Use your invoice to communicate the value you provide to clients.

How to set, earn, and keep fees in a small law firm.

Destroy employee morale in these four easy steps.

By 2030, more Americans will be speaking Spanish as their first language than English. It’s time for lawyers to brush up on their Spanish.

Law Students

When asking for a letter of recommendation, follows these tips to increase your chance of success.

Give value in advance. Offer to answer legal questions. Send useful information in manageable bites. If, for example, you specialize in bankruptcy, a summary of a bankruptcy case that affects real-estate transactions will interest real-estate lawyers.

Other things you do to build your reputation—teaching, publishing, and organization work—help position you to build the trust of your prospects. Referral sources can encourage potential clients to hire you by telling them that you are president of your bar association or that you sit pro tem in the local courts.

The next step on your Contact Management Form can be a phone call, an email, a letter, an invitation to an event or to lunch—whatever you are comfortable with, taking into account your relationship with that prospect.

Regarding lunch, if you take the time to have it anyway, use the time well by lunching with prospects. But since eating lunch with a prospect might take more time and energy than just grabbing a bite to eat, don’t feel you have to do it every day. Find a level of activity that works for you. Lunch need not be just a twosome. Consider inviting another compatible person who might also benefit from the contact. For example, if you plan to have lunch with a business lawyer, invite an accountant to join you. They might be good prospects for each other as well as for you, and they will appreciate your having gotten them together.

Be Grateful unto Them

Build trust by showing appreciation. When your marketing pays off and someone refers you a potential client, send a thank-you note where appropriate. Don’t feel compelled to send a thank-you note for every call you get, or you will spend too much good time thanking people for bad referrals. But you should acknowledge a potential client referred by a source that you have been romancing. Similarly, a referral that might appear high quality to someone outside your field merits a note, even if you don’t accept the case. Often, well-intentioned people refer you clients who look good to them but not to you.

For more tips, check out our article “Marketing Your Law Practice Part 4: Developing Your Referral Sources.”

Once you are clear about the benefits you offer, the next step is to decide which benefits you want to reveal. Keep in mind that whenever you communicate with someone, you reveal something about yourself. What you reveal may be positive or negative. It may be accurate or inaccurate. It may have been communicated intentionally or unintentionally. But every communication reveals something, so you may as well try to communicate the things you want people to know.

Think about the personal qualities you possess that you want your targets to notice. For example, you may want your targets to know that you are knowledgeable and skilled in your practice. Think about your systems—your guiding principles and procedures that insure quality service. From now on, every communication with your targets should have the goal of communicating these benefits, whether it is by phone, in person, via the Internet, through your promotional materials, or through the media.

For more marketing tips, check out our book Selling in Your Comfort Zone.

1. Find and arrange speaking opportunities
2. Deliver effective speeches for BizDev purposes.

Attorneys, managing partners, marketing partners, in-house marketing staff, legal professional development staff and administrators are welcome to call in and listen.

Please note: This panel is one of the ways we provide added value to the community we serve and value in advance to those who are not yet working with us. There is no payment to Kohn Communications for you to attend. However, to control the telephone expense of large numbers of attendees, we are using the services of FreeConferenceCalling.Com. Using this service, you will be charged by your telephone service provider for the normal cost of a one-hour call from your telephone to the 218 area code. If you want to know the cost of the call, please contact your provider.

PANEL MEMBERS:

Robert Kohn
Senior Vice President
Kohn Communications

Lawrence Kohn
Founder & President
Kohn Communications

EVENT & RSVP DETAILS:

Topic: Tips for Effective Public Speaking
Date: Tuesday May 22, 2012
Time: 1:30 pm Pacific, 2:30 pm Mountain, 3:30 pm Central, 4:30 pm Eastern
Format: Audio conferencing only
Length: 60 minutes
Cost: Normal cost of a one-hour call from your telephone to the 218 area code. Please contact your provider.

RSVP Deadline: May 21

To register, please complete the information below. You will receive an email with the call-in number and passcode. We look forward to your joining us.

Avoid these social media pitfalls.

LinkedIn offers more than social media for lawyers: social networking.

Get specific … on your LinkedIn profile.

Use social media tools within law firms to collaborate with clients and colleagues.

Put Pinterest on your radar and start thinking about how you might use it.

Law Students

LinkedIn do’s and don’ts for law students.

Here at Kohn Communications, our interest has always been to help law firms grow. Especially in service industries like law, growth is absolutely critical to remain competitive. Your aim is to provide the best and most services to clients—the more services you provide, the better able you are to attract clients, keep them, and handle all their work. Ultimately, you’re either moving forward or you’re moving backward.

One of the primary strategies to keep moving forward is through lateral hiring—expanding your practice by bringing in partners from other firms. There are many reasons law firms should consider growing their practices through lateral hiring.

1. Lateral hiring is the fastest way to add new practice areas.

2. It’s also a way to upgrade a firm’s talent and rainmaking capabilities.

3. Lateral hiring brings diversity of different experience to your firm. You can actually learn from your new partners’ backgrounds and their experiences.

Tip: Some argue that lateral hiring erodes your firm’s culture, but that really doesn’t need to be the case if you hire carefully and thoughtfully.

4. Growing your firm demonstrates to your partners, both potential and existing, that you are focused on their success. Your partners will be happy to see the firm improving, competing, and doing well, while hopefully good public relations and marketing will surround your growth and generate positive buzz in the marketplace as well.

5. Although individual lawyers can expand their book of business through their own personal efforts, bringing in additional people who have their own books of business and new expertise needed by clients promotes synergy.

6. Lateral growth is the main method by which most firms grow, and among larger firms for the past number of years, along with mergers, it has been the preferred method.

For more tips, check out our marketing seminar “Growth Through Lateral Partners.”

A Simple System

If you are feeling that all this is too much to take on and keep up, start simple. Resist any impulse to plan a system so elaborate that it overwhelms you and protects you from actually having to do anything. Consider these ideas:

Label a folder “MARKETING” and keep it in your office within view and easy reach. Into that folder put notes on prospects, notes on marketing ideas, prospect lists, information on prospects—anything related to your marketing effort. The folder gives you a central place to find your marketing materials without having to rummage around and lose momentum.

Now start a prospect list or even several lists. Possible lists may include people you want to meet, people who already refer clients, and people who might refer clients but haven’t yet. If you don’t have a list to which you regularly add new prospects, you won’t remember them when you are trying to recall good prospects. We tend to remember memorable people, not good prospects. Train your assistant to ask you when you come back from lunch if the person you had lunch with should go into your database.

In addition to putting names on a prospect list, you need a consistent way to track your interactions with each prospect. To meet this need, Kohn Communications has developed a Contact Management Form. Print out this form. On the line headed “Action,” note your next step with this prospect. The head in the date column, “Do,” is not misspelled. A due date just gets in line with every other deadline. A do date is more precise. Once you have decided the next step and when you will take that step, put it on the form and on your calendar. Treat it like any other appointment. If something comes up preventing you from taking the action you had scheduled, it’s OK to give yourself a continuance, but a continuance includes committing to a new date.

Also fill out Contact Management Forms for people you expect to meet before you meet them. Starting the form will start you thinking about them as prospects.

Don’t waste time or create an artificial obstacle by trying to set up the perfect database. If you don’t already have a database program up and running, try Microsoft Outlook or your word-processing program. I say again: keep it simple.

For more tips, check out our article “Marketing Your Law Practice Part 4: Developing Your Referral Sources.”

Find meaning in your law practice.

Build a better life with these tips from a lawyer among the Wisest Americans.

Americans need to work less—and that means lawyers too.

On the other hand, being a workaholic may not be such a bad thing—if you’re engaged with your work.

The lost art of unavailability.

Law Students

Five tips for early bar exam prep.

Although you feel proud of the things you sell,
If their value is secret, they won’t sell well.
So your job is explaining the reasons to buy.
When folks understand them, they’ll give them a try.

The core of selling in your comfort zone is communicating value to quality targets. To sell in your comfort zone, you must develop communication strategies that give you a high expectation of safety and effectiveness.

Safety

Selling doesn’t require stereotypical salesperson behavior. You don’t have to be pushy, sleazy, or abusive in any way. You don’t have to feel awkward about selling. Rather, you have to learn how to communicate your ability to offer value. Communicating value gives you valid reasons for reaching out to your targets. It allows you to feel good about yourself and proud of what you offer.

Effectiveness

You can increase your expectation of effectiveness by communicating the benefits you offer. By communicating benefits, you communicate two qualities that are particularly important for increasing your effectiveness: capability and compatibility.

Communicating capability is the process of inspiring confidence in your ability to help your targets. Communicating compatibility is the process of revealing your ability to work and communicate well with your targets. The more effective you are in communicating capability and compatibility, the more effective you will be in motivating your targets to hire you and refer you to their contacts.

For more marketing tips, check out our book Selling in Your Comfort Zone.

Tip: Don’t spread yourself too thin. Pick one or two organizations that you want to commit to so you can really make a difference.

As important as it is to identify a cause that you’re passionate about, it’s equally vital to choose an organization full of good prospects. You don’t want to create the impression that you’re only volunteering in order to sell yourself and your services, but the fact is every single person whom you come into contact with is an opportunity to communicate how you can bring value to them. So when you’re selecting an organization with which to become involved, consider what you want to gain from the experience. If part of your goal is public relations, then you need to select an organization that gives you access to prospects. For example, if an organization has a lot of great targets on the board of directors, but you’re not on the board and don’t have access to them, volunteering there won’t do much good for your marketing efforts.

One way to make sure that you’ll meet a lot of good prospects at the organization where you volunteer is to serve on the best committee for meeting lots of new people: the membership committee. Organizations grow by reaching out through existing members. If you’re on the membership committee, you now have access to all of the organization’s members. You’ll be able to meet and develop relationships with them while also helping them identify people you should be calling to promote membership in the organization. You could even offer to go out and meet with those people to get them involved in the organization.

Be an ambassador. Help the organization identify the target market for not only its membership but your own client and referral-source base. For example, if you are active in an organization that doesn’t have an in-house counsel section, you could offer to create one and then reach out to in-house counsels to introduce them to the organization and, at the same time, yourself.

Tip: Market the volunteerism in your law firm by adding a section to your website that promotes the organizations that you are involved in. This kind of feel-good promotion makes visitors to your site feel comfortable with the firm.

To quote Tom Lehrer, there’s nothing wrong with “doing well by doing good.” If you can get involved with an organization that does work you believe in while achieving your public relations goals, it’s the best of both worlds.

For more tips, check out our marketing seminar “Benefitting from Public Relations.”