For some time now, the concept of marketing has circulated among those in the law profession, as it has in most other professions. However, unfortunate the connotations of that word at first seemed, the basic usefulness - and sheer necessity - of the concept has led it to a position of relative acceptance. Most agree that some form self-promotion is needed for a law firm to stay competitive. Beneath its broad imprimatur, marketing has many facets.
Since law firms receive an important segment of their business from professional referral sources, other professionals - physicians or accountants or financial planners - are, in effect, a market that every firm needs to cultivate carefully.
Historically, attorneys marketed through social and philanthropic organizations, groups most visibly ruled by an "old boys network." While this avenue still exists, its influence has waned somewhat, due to increased competition. Since the competition has become so great, more aggressive marketing methods are now necessary to cultivate professional referral sources.
One of these is to become active in professional organizations whose members either are potential clients, or typically advise them. If, for instance, you are a patent attorney, you might find it beneficial to network at the corporate patent counsel association. If you litigate cases for major corporations, you might consider the local bar association's corporate counsel groups and the American Corporate Counsel Association.
Networking
Looking farther afield, if you are an attorney who litigates major personal injury cases, you could become active in the local bar associations in order to meet young general practice and personal injury attorneys who don't have the resources necessary to handle a major for medical-malpractice case, but could refer these kinds of cases to you. If you are practicing martimonial law, on the other hand, it may benefit you to network among general corporate and tax attorneys, as well as those engaged in a general practice. since these lawyers often become the confidantes of their clients. If you are practicing in the insurance defense area, it would be wise to join the local, state and national claims and risk manager associations to meet professionals in those fields.
Once you've found and joined the appropriate professional organizations, it's important to make a name for yourself. Serve on committees, get elected to office, volunteer to speak on various subjects at monthly meetings. Stand up, in other words, and get heard!
But what if you're more of an academician than a joiner and organizer? In that case. the alternative route is to promote your expertise, pursuing basically the identical strategy as the joiners and organizers. By presenting papers at conventions of professionals whose referral business you seek, by publishing articles in the professional trade journals of these same groups, you make a name for yourself as an expert in areas of interest or concern to them.
If your referral market is the health care industry, for instance, you would be wise to publish articles on legal issues that cater to health professionals and administrators. The same holds true, of course, if your referral market is management or finance professionals.
You might also want to look for new industry-specific publications that would welcome you as a legal columnist. To succeed as a columnist you need to identify topics that are of primary concern to your audience. You will also need to offer legal advice in an engaging and entertaining style, using terminology easily understood by a lay audience. "Legalese" will not fare well in this particular arena.
Another way to offer free advice and establish a name for yourself to create a series of evaluation forms in your area of expertise. If you handle employee benefits, for instance, referring accountants, tax and corporate attorneys might welcome an employee benefits evaluation form to use with their clients.
Once you've gathered a professional referral network, be vigilant about keeping your name and your activities before them. You can do this in a number of different ways. One is to publish a monthly newsletter containing information from various sources that may be of interest to professionals in these fields. If you are a tax attorney, you might want to offer an update on tax law changes along with short educational articles on various aspects of tax law. You can further expand your referral network by purchasing a mailing list from a trade or professional organization and using that to distribute your information newsletter more widely.
The same list can be used to mail reprints of your published articles or speeches. And, when you do deliver a speech, it's a good idea to send a substantive press release about its contents to the trade publications of the industry and the referral sources you wish to cultivate. Portions of' your address may actually appear as a column in one of these journals.
With all professional referral strategies and efforts, however, it's important to remember one thing: don't expect any one meeting, or speech, or article to do all the work. What works is a cumulative effort. In fact, it's been calculated that we require exposure to an unfamiliar name no less than seven times before it is finally a name we remember.