Effective marketing is an ongoing journey, especially because the whole landscape of online marketing is always in flux. Your law practice changes over time, and changes at Google, Facebook and other big sites affect your strategy, too. Even online user behavior is changing at a rate that’s difficult to keep up with. Carving out success in this kind of shifting environment often feels like a gargantuan task, but the challenges can be overcome. You just need to be sure that your firm has a plan in place to adapt to the changes.

Jeff Bezos has many powerful mantras for his business, but this is one of my favorites: It's always "Day 1" at Amazon. What he means is that Amazon will never stop being a startup. It’s a message that he drilled down on in a recent letter to shareholders (written from a building he works in named “Day 1”), in which he wrote: "Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1."

Email is the global de facto communication standard. Business use of email continues to grow. Email is also a hybrid form of communication — a written form used conversationally. This hybrid nature, coupled with habits developed early in its use, results in email being both the boon and the bane of the modern work world. It is the boon because we can communicate globally, 24 hours a day. It is the bane because everyone else can too! Consider these suggestions to make email part of a more productive day.

The Super Marketing Conference in Boston, a collaboration between MassLOMAP, the ABA Law Practice Division and Massachusetts Continuing Legal Education, assembled expert speakers from around the country to provide practical, hands-on advice to solo and small law firms. Five themes emerged. As you move forward with your marketing plans, consider how you can turn these themes into action steps.

You're in a small firm with one or more baby boomer senior partners, and they’ve just made you an offer of partnership. Congratulations. Maybe. Before you accept, there are lots of questions you should ask. Here are just a few, starting with the critical question: Is there a written partnership agreement?

In my last column, I discussed how you can relocate to another state without sitting for another bar exam. One question that naturally stems from that discussion is what to do if you make a mistake in your relocation, and you fail to do something required by your new state’s bar. Receiving a letter from the state bar questioning your fitness to practice, or whether you have followed all the rules permitting you to practice, induces panic. Here is how to handle it.

Sanctions. That word has always troubled me. It’s a contronym, a word that has opposite meanings. Lawyers know that a motion for sanctions asks the court to penalize an adversary’s bad act. But other English speakers define a sanction as a blessing. No wonder your client is confused. English has plenty of contronyms.

Earlier this year, I attended the Group Legal Services Association annual meeting in Arizona. The highlight was the spirited "State of the Industry" panel. While the panel reported that the industry isn't yet seeing change at a disruptive rate, plans and platforms alike are evolving and creating opportunities for lawyers. However, the concept of legal services plans still seems relatively unknown. To start, here's an overview.

A whopping 91 percent of in-house counsel rate an attorney’s articles and speeches as very to somewhat important when evaluating who to hire, according to the latest data from Greentarget. Just as important, 77 percent rated relevant blog posts as such. The key word is “relevant.” How to become so? By becoming a singular voice. And this means niche blogging. Why? Clients don’t hire generalists. They hire specialists. So be one.

To use a comparison from my days as a high school teacher, tactics are to objectives as strategies are to goals. You and your client are in different businesses (unless you do legal malpractice work) and have different business goals. But your client has been sued and is now at your doorstep. Now you have some common interests. You need to make sure your objectives are aligned with those of your client so you can employ tactics that will help you achieve those goals and objectives.