Tag Archives: twitter

What Do Clients Want?

Posted on January 9, 2013 by | Leave a comment

Clients are a law firm’s real assets. But how do they choose your firm over another? Turns out that subject matter expertise, a successful track record and having a prior relationship with your firm are the most-mentioned reasons clients choose a law firm, according to the Altman Weil Why Clients Choose Law Firms survey.

Other top reasons clients choose a firm are:

  • Demonstrated understanding of their business or industry
  • Referrals or recommendations from colleagues
  • Personal contact through face-to-face meetings and phone calls

At the bottom of the list:

  • Direct mail or email communications about your firm
  • Social media activity
  • Invitations to social or sporting events and meals

What does this mean for you? Well, first, you can probably relax about building a killer Facebook page for your firm. Attracting clients is all about what it’s always been about: providing excellent service.

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Monday Clicks: “Princess” Is Not a Career

Posted on November 12, 2012 by | Leave a comment

This week, there’s big news in the hot market for cross-border law firm mergers, even as the rest of the M&A market stays quiet.  We also have some insight into law firms and technology, from the increase in consumer-friendly electronics to the importance of comprehensive social media strategies.  Also: Justice Sotomayor dashes the princess dreams of little girls everywhere.

  • A major international law firm merger is in the works, reports the Wall Street Journal.  SNR Denton has proposed a tie-up with Canada-based Fraser Milner Casgrain and Paris-based Salans.  As most industry watchers know, SNR Denton is itself the product of the 2010 merger of U.S.-based Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal and the U.K.’s Denton Wilde Sapte.  The latest merger, which will be presented to the firms’ partnerships for a vote tomorrow, would result in the world’s 7th largest firm by head count.  Says Ashby Jones of the WSJ:

[T]his year has seen a flurry of cross-border law-firm deals. For a growing number of firms, the possible upside is worth the risk. Demand for legal services cratered in the economic downturn, and remains flat years later. Major law firms that once had more work than they can handle now face stiff competition for clients, whose continued press for discounts has hampered law firm profit growth.

  • While cross-border mergers among law firms may be on the rise, the overall merger market is still depressed.  The New York Times DealBook’s “Deal Professor”, Steven M. Davidoff, believes that M&A activity is due for a cyclical rise, but he expects the improvement to be “modest at best.”  In a column predicting the impact of the presidential election on merger markets, Davidoff is cautious about the near future.  The outlook hinges on the way the President and Congress handle the looming fiscal cliff, among other key policy issues.
  • The Law Librarian Blog points us to a new article on teaching methods for legal research.  Author Cindy Guyer of the USC Gould School of Law takes a close look at how law schools currently fulfill the ABA imperative to provide “substantial instruction” in legal research, and suggests ways to change the traditional pedagogy to respond to changes in research platforms and generational attitudes towards research.
  • The American Lawyer’s 2012 Tech Survey results are out.  The survey of 83 AmLaw 200 CIOs and tech chiefs reveals that it’s a brave new world for law firms, technologically.  Most notably, law firms are broadly embracing consumer-friendly technology and moving away from the Blackberry.
  • On the subject of law firms and new technology, in-house attorney Susan Moon has some wise words over on Above the Law.  Moon describes her professional foray into Twitter, and explains why she thinks more lawyers should try it: “Compared to the other two main social media sites that lawyers use, Facebook and LinkedIn, Twitter offers the most varied networking opportunities.”
  • But as law firms and lawyers embrace new technologies, firms will need to create comprehensive strategies and policies to manage the activity.  Australasian Legal Business is reporting on a recent Thomson Reuters survey of large law firms in Australia which found that less than a quarter (24%) of surveyed firms had a central social media strategy in place.

As we discussed last week, a career in the law may not be the best bet at the moment.  But it’s still a better goal than “princess” as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out recently on Sesame Street.  Sotomayor isn’t new to the Street – she laid down the law earlier this year in the seminal case of Baby Bear v. Goldilocks.

Posted by Emily Fisher with contributions from Marianne Purzycki

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Law Firm Websites and Beyond: How to Win and Retain Business

Posted on July 12, 2012 by | 1 Comment

It’s hard to believe that the first law firm website was launched less than twenty years ago.  According to a recent blog post by Robert Ambrogi, it was Venable, which launched the first law firm website in March 1994. Considered cutting edge at the time, law firm websites have since been joined by wikis, extranets, blogs and other forms of social media as part of the business development toolkit of large law firms.  A recent report from Hubbard One (a Thomson Reuters business), Building Relationships with Global General Counsel, highlights the continuing importance of law firm websites as well as the use of newer social media tools.

The survey consisted of interviews with 40 General Counsel (GCs) worldwide.  Ninety percent of the respondents were from US-based companies, two-thirds of which have international operations.  Eight percent of the respondents were based in Europe and almost all respondents (95%) work in large private or public companies with annual revenues greater than US$500 million.

Not surprisingly, the two main factors that GCs say are important when selecting a law firm are the experience of the firm’s attorneys (33%) and the firm’s expert knowledge of the company’s sector or industry (31%).  These two factors far outweigh competitive and/or flexible pricing (16%), not to mention brand reputation (9%) and efficiency/legal project management (7%).

Websites

There are numerous channels that allow firms to showcase their expertise including proposals, websites, newsletters and e-mail alerts.  While the survey found that many GCs relied on proposals to assess the suitability of firms for a project when there was no clear choice of a firm to work with, websites are still important tools that GCs use to help them select firms. 

Many interviewed GCs indicated that they visit the website of law firms they are considering working with once or twice per month. Though these visits may be as short and practical as looking at an attorney’s biography or finding relevant contact information, they leave a deep impression on the visitor. It is crucial that law firms have an up-to-date website with a constant stream of relevant and original material that is easy to access.

The survey also noted that clear and usable navigation (34%), relevant and valuable content (31%), and quick and easy searches (29%) were equally important for busy GCs.  Of lesser value were interactive user experiences (2%) and visually attractive design (1%).  As one GC interviewed said about the problem with poorly designed websites:

 “Too much junk. No effective search. Just tell us who you are, where you are, who your lawyers are and what you’re really good at. The rest of the fluffy stuff is superfluous and should not clutter navigation bars, front pages or make it more difficult to find the important content.”

While GCs may not want a website that is too flashy, that doesn’t mean that they don’t appreciate an up-to-date appearance.  Branding and having a modern look are important, too. 

Larger, often more corporate law firms have understood that “brand is as important [to them], as it is to Procter & Gamble, Nestle or anybody else.” Yet in other cases, GCs regularly see the type of “website [that] looks like it was made in 2005 and not appropriate for high-resolution modern screens,” which “just looks like they’re on the cheap side.”

In terms of the most often viewed sections of a firm website, survey respondents spent the most time looking at lawyer and staff profiles (combined score of 40%), followed by practice areas and service offerings (22%).  GCs pay close attention to lawyer profiles, looking at a lawyer’s personal experience or prior legal work (combined score of 55%), their list of clients (21%), and what school they attended (11%).

E-Mail Alerts, Briefings, Whitepapers, Social Media

Beyond websites, GCs find that the most useful ways to receive information from law firms is from email alerts (33%), industry briefings/seminars (25%), industry reports/whitepapers (18%), and webinars (16%).  Similar to websites, these communication channels are only useful to GCs when they are highly focused to meet a particular need.  Extranets/portals, blogs and video, according to the survey, were underutilized but may become more important over time as GCs become more comfortable with these tools.

When it comes to sourcing information about or from law firms, blogs (35%) and LinkedIn (26%) are the most popular means used by interviewed GCs.  Podcasts and video are used by 11% of GCs, while YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and SlideShare have limited appeal.  More than two-thirds of respondents find “law firm engagement in social media ‘not very valuable,’ and a quarter ‘not valuable at all,’” indicating that firms might not be engaging correctly with social media.  Firms appear to be slowly embracing the medium’s interactive nature, a topic that was covered in our interviews last month with lawyer Dan Goldman of the Mayo Clinic and Sarah Feingold, general counsel at Etsy.  One GC who responded to the survey commented:

 [Firms are] treating it as “an adjunct to their normal marketing strategy.” He explains: “So, if they win an award, they’ll tweet about it or put it on LinkedIn. But the interactive nature of social media which is supposed to make it what it is, no, I do not think that they have grasped the proper way to use it.”

The Future

Looking towards the future, GCs were asked what trends they thought would impact how they select, communicate and collaborate with law firms in the next three years.  Relationship automation (e-billing being the most common form) was ranked as the top development, with cloud computing and online work collaboration in second place, and web intelligence (data analytics) in third.

Law firms are under heightened pressure to set themselves apart from competitors in order to improve their chances of winning work and retaining clients.  GCs are increasingly expecting law firms to provide them with highly relevant information on a timely basis, using many different communication channels.  Successful firms will not only provide targeted content on websites and via email alerts and newsletters, but will also be comfortable as an active participant on other social media platforms.

Posted by Marianne Purzycki

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Blogging/Tweeting: Promoting Your Work “Pays” Off

Posted on May 24, 2012 by | 2 Comments

We’ve written numerous times about the use of social media in law firms both from a content standpoint as well as noting that for most lawyers and law firms, having a web presence is essential these days.  While we know that social media usage in law firms is growing, supporting data on whether or not there is a return on investment for law firms (or for any other business) employing social media as part of their marketing mix is difficult if not almost impossible to come by.  In fact, a recent article by McKinsey & Company states that many companies find it hard to devote significant resources to social media precisely because “there’s no single measure of social media’s financial impact.” 

However, despite not having a definitive financial metric for social media, there are other ways to evaluate this form of marketing.  A recent post on the London School of Economics Impact of Social Sciences blog provides some data and insights on how social media can be used effectively as a marketing tool.  Last month Melissa Terras wrote about her experience blogging and tweeting about all of her academic research papers. Terras, who is the Co-Director of University College London’s (UCL) Centre for Digital Humanities, was curious to see what impact social media would have on the dissemination of her body of work.  So she took the 26 articles – which had already been published in refereed journals and were available via UCL’s online repository – and then blogged and tweeted about each one.

Before she began the experiment, most of her papers had only one or two downloads, no matter how long they had been in the UCL online repository.  But upon blogging/tweeting about them, there were on average 70 downloads of each paper within 24 hours.  Not a head-turning statistic by Internet standards, but it indicates a big step forward in interest in her work. 

As part of the project, she charted the monthly download counts of the top ten papers downloaded from her department over the last year.  She found that the increase in downloads – the upward spikes on the graph – corresponded to her blogging/tweeting about her research.  Additionally, seven out of the 10 most downloaded papers include her as an author and she gets credit for 27 out of the top 50 downloads as well as about one-third of the entire downloads for her department. 

“My stuff isn’t better than my colleagues’ work,” Terras freely admits. “They’re all doing wonderful things! But I’m just the only one actively promoting access to my research papers.” And that’s one of the take-ways in this experiment, according to Terras: “If you tell people about your research, they look at it. Your research will get looked at more than papers which are not promoted via social media.”

Another reason that her experiment was so successful, she theorizes, is that she already had a digital presence. She has built up her audience over three years by “hanging out and chatting, pointing to interesting stuff, repointing to interesting stuff, asking questions, answering questions, getting stroppy, [and] sending supportive comments.” 

She concludes: “If you want people to find and read your research, build up a digital presence in your discipline, and use it to promote your work when you have something interesting to share.”  In the end, whether the discussion revolves around academia or law firms, the bottom line is that having a social media presence plus having something meaningful to say is a powerful combination.

Posted by Marianne Purzycki

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Twitter Aims to Curb Use of Patents in Litigation

Posted on April 20, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Heralding a “new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers,” Twitter released a draft of its Innovator’s Patent Agreement (IPA) on Tuesday.  Typically, employees sign an agreement that grants the company the legal right to any patents filed that relate to the employee’s work.  The patent can then be used by the company in litigation, either offensively or for defensive purposes. Twitter’s IPA is unique in that the company promises not to use the patents in offensive litigation without permission from its employees.  They will only be used for defensive purposes.  Furthermore, “this control flows with the patents” so if the patents are sold, they can only be used as the inventor intended.

For many law firms, intellectual property litigation is an area that is thriving.  Demand for IP litigation continues to buck the negative trends in the overall legal market, as we noted earlier this year.  Peer Monitor data reported a 6.2% increase in demand for IP litigation in 2011. Fending off patent trolls, high stakes litigation involving market equals – especially in the high tech industry, and more global IP litigation have all been cited as some of the factors contributing to growth in this practice area.

Associate professor Eric Goldman at Santa Clara University School of Law and blogger on Internet law matters was interviewed by Reuters regarding the Twitter announcement.  He believes the company’s reputation could rise among software engineers, some of whom have not been happy about having their patents used in litigation against other companies.  He said, “Unquestionably, it’s an effort to define Twitter’s brand in the marketplace and to signal that its perhaps more engineering-friendly than companies that wouldn’t make such a promise.”

The IPA will be implemented by Twitter later this year and “it will apply to all patents issued to [their] engineers, both past and present.” The company has posted the IPA on GitHub in an effort to encourage discussion and share feedback among companies that might want to implement a similar arrangement.  It will be interesting to see if other companies adopt this approach or something similar in the future.

Posted by Marianne Purzycki

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Legal IT Vendors Embracing Social Media

Posted on April 13, 2012 by | Leave a comment

Earlier this week we discussed how the proliferation of mobile technology is impacting the legal industry.  A recent post from The Orange Rag, a UK blog about legal technology, details how legal IT vendors are incorporating social media.  Among the more intriguing new offerings:

  • Peppermint Technology is embedding Twitter streams in client and prospective client records, which allows law firms to track a client’s tweets alongside news and other aggregated data.
  • Online conveyancing firm 1st Property Lawyers has signed on with Feefo, a platform for online feedback.  Feefo enables the firm’s customers to post ratings and reviews of their experience the way diners might review a new restaurant on Yelp.
  • Eclipse Legal System is incorporating Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook into its Proclaim Case Management system.  Users can now access news and Twitter feeds, revise LinkedIn profiles, and post status updates to Facebook, all  from within Proclaim.

As the legal industry continues to embrace new technologies, it is likely more legal vendors will begin incorporating social media and mobile technologies into their products.

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Live-Tweeting of the Social Media Forum

Posted on September 22, 2011 by | Leave a comment

Today we will be live-tweeting from the Institute’s Social Media Forum in New York.  You can follow events on our Twitter feed, and join the conversation with hashtag #smlf11.

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