Business Development

When coaching attorneys, I ask them to identify their biggest marketing and business development challenges. Their issues run the gamut from not enjoying cocktail parties to recently having relocated. Some of the issues they name are legitimate ...

In today’s saturated marketplace of ideas, many law firms struggle to create content that connects with audiences suffering from information overload. Faced with this challenge, legal content creators have three options: give up, trudge on or ...

If your firm doesn’t acquire quality leads through the use of online marketing, pay-per-click advertising and SEO, you’re effectively handing cases to your web-savvy competitors. When consumers shop for a lawyer, they almost always start by ...

Even in the biggest cities, the legal community can be surprisingly small. Within a practice area everybody seems to know everybody else. Walk down your city’s legal Main Street or hang out at the courthouse, and you can’t seem to avoid the ...

It’s difficult to see the connection between starting a blog, which is essentially dropping your words into a space on the Internet, and actually increasing the amount of business coming your way. Much hay has been made about search engine ...

There are a lot of theories about what it takes to bring in business. One I always like to mention to lawyers is that it takes 10 to 15 good contacts to produce one client. Why so many? Because most of your contacts will not turn into clients.

Last week at ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago, Allison Shields and I chatted with lawyers about shaping their online ...

There’s a tricky balance that lawyers need to strike: staying focused on the "task at hand" while keeping an eye on the future. The task at hand involves acquiring technical skills — drafting, negotiation, deposition-taking — at a relatively ...

Your referral network is a living thing. If you don’t feed it and water it, it will die, and if you don’t prune it back occasionally, it will collapse under its own weight. If you’ve developed a network by identifying good sources and asking ...

A common frustration among lawyers is that their networks are too low caliber to provide access to decision-makers. If you have a business development plan, it is probably too generic to give you a meaningful edge over the competition. You wish ...