Ever since Attorney at Work was in short pants, Friday has meant delivery of “The Friday Five” to your inbox. It’s our weekly collection of five … for lack of a better word … things: ideas, links, tips, you name it. Sometimes frivolous, sometimes quite serious, but always, every Friday, there’s “The Five.” Wonder which have been our readers’ favorites? Here they are — the most read, most popular 2013 Friday Fives (so far). Looks like there’s a pattern here. What do you think?
1. Really Good Marketing Ideas. Yes, we agree, it seems like cheating for this to be first, since it delivered our free blockbuster marketing e-guide. Still, more readers beat a path to this Friday post than any other this year. Can you blame them? It’s a path that lead to a 53-page collection of really (really!) good marketing ideas from experts around the globe. If you don’t already have yours, click here and download it now.
2. 999 Things Lawyers Should Know About Marketing. Just kidding with that 999 thing, though there were hundreds of ideas exchanged at the Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference in Las Vegas this year. More than 1,300 legal marketing professionals gathered to share secrets and strategies for getting and keeping clients in the “new normal” legal economy. Lucky for us, Mark Beese brought back his five favorite takeaways to sharpen your marketing and business development efforts.
3. Get Real About Marketing. Ever feel like it’s time for a little serious “truth telling?” That’s what came over me the day I wrote this Five: Too many lawyers using bogus excuses for pointless or non-existent marketing tactics tend to push me over the edge. (It’s true, I get cranky sometimes, and judging from responses to this post, so do you!) Here’s my list of five truths from the new legal marketing reality, starting with “size doesn’t matter.”
4. Make the Timekeeping Honor Roll. Wise lawyers know that contemporaneous timekeeping is essential to the success of any fee arrangement — and to the overall financial success of your law firm. Fred Esposito says lawyers who wait to reconstruct their time weekly can lose 25 to 30 percent of it, and those who enter time on a monthly basis can lose as much as 55 to 70 percent. Here’s Fred’s list of five ways to get a whole lot better at tracking your time now.
5. How’s Your Law Practice’s Curb Appeal? As much as we like to think they don’t, appearances do matter. A lot. First impressions can make a big difference to clients. In this Five, Attorney at Work’s Joan Feldman showed readers how to step back, “pull your head out of your computer,” and then do something about those bobblehead collections, sloppy stacks of paper and boxes in the hallway. Take a look at five things you can do right now to polish up your firm’s curb appeal.
Merrilyn Astin Tarlton has been helping lawyers and law firms think differently about the business of practicing law since 1984. She is Partner/Catalyst at Attorney at Work, a founding member of the Legal Marketing Association, an LMA Hall of Fame inductee, and served two terms as president of the College of Law Practice Management.
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