If you are a solo practitioner, of counsel, or a partner at a law firm, you have at least two roles: attorney and entrepreneur. Your time and energy are split between performing client work and making sure new business is coming in the door. Try on a Fresh Perspective. One way attorneys educate themselves about effective business and marketing practices is by attending CLEs. But knowing how important it is to market yourself to your prospective audience, why limit yourself to only legal industry programs?

Using social media incorrectly or ineffectively can be damaging to your professional reputation. It comes down to one thing: expectations.

Lawyers have been conditioned, from time immemorial, to believe that successful marketing means broadcasting superiority. You must have won more false awards, and higher verdicts, and would have established further contrived rankings. To a point, it’s helpful to show that you’re good at what you do; but continually attempting to avenge yourself as best is necessarily a losing game. The perceived superiority of this one-ups-manshipper strategy leads to the creation of massively hyperbolic ads.

It’s 6 p.m. You are about to put the final touches on a brief that is due tomorrow when a message pops up on your laptop. It informs you that a third party has gained control of your system and encrypted all your files. To unencrypt your files, you must pay a ransom. Every single file you have on your computer system is now unreadable. Thanks to this ransomware attack, your practice has basically been shut down while your system is held hostage.

Yesterday, at 2 p.m. Eastern, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released a second batch of the “Panama Papers” in a live and searchable (but stripped-down) database of more than 200,000 entities. Many of the activities unveiled in the papers are not illegal but many are, including laundering money, hiding evidence of crimes, avoiding sanctions and tax evasion.

“We can surely do better,” read the last line of the email. “What the hell does that mean?” asked Margaret. The young associate had just helped win a big case, and she was reading a "thank you for your efforts" email from the lead partner to the supporting team. Based on the tone of the email, it was hard to determine whether the last phrase was meant to encourage or scold.

For lawyers, web marketing is what the French call a devoir — a “have to.” But most of us would rather wash our hands of it. We didn't go to school for an MBA or marketing degree. We have a whole desk full of case files demanding our time and marketing is hitching for a spot in the backseat, at best. But the web is where the clients are and in today's marketplace, Google is the ground from which law firms grow. So we hire people to help us — consultants and companies in the fields of digital marketing, SEO, social media and online advertising. Some are really easy to work with, but they’re about as common as an 8-1 ruling in the Supreme Court. The trick is to find a marketing firm that can get the job done at the right price while keeping your blood pressure below call-an-ambulance level.

Merrilyn Astin Tarlton | Once you've had a good meeting, you want to ensure you don't lose ground.

Last Friday, dozens of women gathered at the San Francisco offices of Seyfarth Shaw for the first Shape the Law unconference. No, no. You didn’t misread, and that isn’t a typo. Popular in the technology world, an unconference transfers control of the proceedings from conference organizer to attendees. There is no set agenda when you arrive; you contribute to its creation. It may sound strange, perhaps chaotic, as it’s easy to picture a lecture hall with everyone shouting ideas as one or two people squiggle unintelligibly on blackboards. The Shape the Law organizers — Laura Maechtlen, Mary Redzic, Alexandra Devendra and Jeena Cho — did their homework to avoid such calamity, and the result was an afternoon of discussion, connection and community.

Information sitting in your law firm's case management software can help you make better-informed marketing decisions — including where and when to advertise. Most firms have the information they need. It's just a matter of making a priority of getting at it, and actually following through. Here are three steps you can take to fine-tune your marketing with a little basic data.