How NCG Can Help Your Law Firm or Small Business Be More Successful

Rethinking Marketing: Bland is a Bad Brand

“Why not upset the apple cart? If you don’t, the apples will rot anyway.”

~ Frank Howard Clark

Have you seen the following video from a few weeks ago? It features a guerrilla marketing strategy of organizing a faux flash mob in Belgium to promote the launch of Turner Network Television’s TNT Benelux network. This video of the live event has seen incredible viral success; in fact, it has been viewed over 30 million times and it’s the second-most shared ad ever. I’m guessing that the Turner Network got what it wanted out of it. Thirty million people across the world now wholeheartedly believe that “TNT Knows Drama.”

Yes, But My Business is Different…

It’s a pretty phenomenal video, isn’t it? But, of course, it’s not for every business. Still, it came to mind as a counterweight to an issue that I’ve seen again and again: The failure of too many businesspeople, lawyers and other professionals to understand that Bland is a Bad Brand.

In fact, some whom I speak with seem especially proud of their stodgy brands. It’s almost as if the blandness is a point of honor for them, as if it conveys the importance and the gravitas of what they do. (“You won’t see me playing around with Twitter or Facebook,” they say.) Forget about flash mobs and guerrilla marketing; these businesspeople are hesitant to engage in any marketing activities that someone, somewhere, might possibly see having too much risk. I’m talking about fairly standard marketing tactics such as writing a blog, giving social media a try, putting some personality in their bios and posts, that type of thing.

Spring Training: Three Lessons on Change from Billy Beane and “Moneyball”

With the first week of April comes a treasured ritual for many: Major League Baseball’s Opening Day. And in fact, ten years ago this spring, a man named Billy Beane changed baseball forever.

The Real Billy Beane

Do you know Billy Beane? If you’re reading this blog, I’m guessing that there’s a good chance you’ve seen the Oscar-nominated movie, Moneyball, and maybe you’ve even read the book. I saw the film recently, and it offers a stimulating look at the revolutionary change that Billy Beane brought to the Oakland A’s a decade ago. But more importantly, Moneyball is a compelling metaphor for the change that’s happening all around us and is affecting our lives and our careers in ways large and small.

The nutshell version of Moneyball is this: In 2002, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, Billy Beane, substituted the statistical theory of the eccentric Bill James for conventional wisdom and the intuition of the team’s baseball scouts. Amid much gnashing of teeth, this new system helped the team find and sign overlooked players who could be had for bargain-basement prices. This in turn allowed the A’s, which had one of the smallest payrolls in baseball, to compete with the very best teams in baseball and break an all-time American League record with 20 consecutive wins during the season.

While they did not become World Series champions, the A’s did make the playoffs, which in itself was an astounding achievement from where they were earlier in the season after losing three of their top players. And more significantly, Beane’s statistical strategy was immediately adapted by the Boston Red Sox, which two years later used it to win their first World Series since 1918. The Red Sox followed this up in 2007 by winning their second World Series in four years, and by that time the entire baseball world had been won over by statisticians from the Ivy League.

Writers such as Jason Fell have already done a good job of describing the lessons that Moneyball holds for business people in any industry. He finds the following three lessons: 1) Make change when it’s needed, 2) Stand by your decisions, and 3) Set realistic goals. Fell’s first lesson strikes me as the most important one to come out of Moneyball, and it’s worth a closer look.

“Make change when it’s needed” sounds straightforward and easy, doesn’t it? Yet, this may be the most difficult lesson to enact in real life. How can any of us say for certain when change is needed? Reasonable people disagree all the time about this, whether it’s in the baseball clubhouse or the executive lunchroom. In fact, change is guaranteed to be the one constant in our lives and careers. All of us are surrounded by so much change on an ongoing basis, how are we to make sense of it all?  A popular axiom would have us “embrace change,” but if we were to do so indiscriminately, we would have no time for anything else. Luckily for us, Moneyball offers a way to work through these questions.

The Digital Lawyer: ‘Topics in Digital Law Practice’ Course Offered Online to Attorneys; Classes in Document Automation, Virtual Law Practice & More

Are you still practicing law the way they did back in the 20th century, or are you taking advantage of all the changes in technology that have been sweeping the profession? Would you call yourself a digital lawyer, or an analog attorney in a digital world?

From document automation to the use of technology in the courtroom, to the rise of virtual law offices, the practice of law has been changing dramatically over the last few years. If you’re one of the many who feel as if it’s been impossible to keep up with many of these changes, you might be interested in an upcoming online course offered by CALI, the Center for Computer-Assisted Legal Instruction.

CALI is a nonprofit that’s been helping law students for 30 years, and they have put together a nine-week introduction to the many ways in which technology is changing the profession. Entitled Topics in Digital Law Practice, the web course starts on February 10 and will feature a different guest lecturer on Fridays at 2:00 Eastern time. Each class is just an hour, and if students are unable to make it to a particular class, a recording will be available later on the website. While the course is primarily geared to law students and law professors, all interested parties are invited to register. And while there is homework, there are no final exams, grades or CLE credits. Oh, and by the way, it’s free.

Ignition and Liftoff: The Future of Law Firm Marketing and Business Development

What does the future hold? To quote Nobel laureate Niels Bohr, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” And given all the ongoing change in both the legal profession and the marketing world, it must take a certain level of foolhardiness to attempt to tackle the subject of the future of legal marketing. And yet, there are sufficiently strong indications of where things are going that I felt I was on solid ground in my recent presentation, “The Future of Law Firm Marketing and Business Development.” Of course, I wasn’t predicting the imminent end of the world, or even The End of Lawyers (although I did mention Richard Susskind’s excellent and thought-provoking book of the same name).

The theme for the June 9 presentations at the Denver Bar Association was The Future of the Law, and the format was in the style of the tech-industry’s fast-paced, five-minute Ignite presentations. Obviously, it’s absurd to try to address such a complex topic in such a superficial way. But it did make it fun. And even given the mandated 15-second limit for each slide, and the speaker slip-ups and the lack of time to correct misstatements, some points worth considering can nonetheless emerge within the Ignite format. But don’t just take my word for it; see what you think and share your thoughts.

The Unique Selling Proposition Gets a Makeover: Attorneys, What’s Your “Unique Lawyering Proposition”?

The “Unique Selling Proposition” is a concept that’s close to the heart of marketers everywhere. The USP is a shorthand way of describing what every product or service desperately needs: a meaningful point of distinction, a way of differentiating it from the products or services of its competitors. In a crowded marketplace, a well-defined USP is truly critical, because without it, no product or service offering can expect to stand out.

Back in the early 1980s, Federal Express became famous for its groundbreaking Unique Selling Proposition, which guaranteed that the firm would deliver a letter or package anywhere in the United States overnight. The promise contained in the company’s tagline, revolutionary at the time, now seems almost quaint: “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”

Dated as that may sound today, 30 years ago it set Federal Express apart from every one of its competitors, and in a very significant and meaningful way: In the days before “overnighting” a document became standard practice, and more than a decade before email and the web became commonplace, nobody else was able to make that promise.

However, when I talk about the concept of a Unique Selling Proposition with attorneys, I often get blank stares. Granted, it’s a marketing concept that’s not taught in law school. But there’s more to it than that. For many lawyers and other professionals, it seems, well, unprofessional – and even flat-out wrong – to think of themselves as providers of services that must be marketed and sold. It is the profession of law, after all, isn’t it?

But – given all that – might there be something in the Unique Selling Proposition concept that could be helpful to lawyers in these competitive times? What if we rebranded the USP as the “Unique Lawyering Proposition”?

Personal Branding 101: Honing Your Elevator Pitch, Knowing Your Audience and Speaking Their Language

I was at a networking event recently where the organizers drew a business card from a fishbowl to select one lucky attendee. They then provided that individual with a full two minutes to sell the crowd on their company, their services or themselves.

It turned out that the individual whose name was drawn was unemployed. What an opportunity, right? Here was the chance to sell himself before a room full of well-educated, well-connected people from a diversity of professions and industries. But how did this individual use this opportunity?

Well, basically, he squandered it. He talked about what he did at his old job in mind-numbing detail, and then he talked some more about what he did at his old job, and then he finished up by – you guessed it – talking about what he did at his old job.

Yikes.

And the worst thing was that he did such a deep dive into what he did at his old job – without ever explaining what he did at a sufficiently high level for this intelligent, but diverse audience from many different fields – that many of us were left speechless.

You see, ironically enough, when this guy had finished talking for two minutes about what he did at his old job, none of us could even tell you what he had done at his old job. Nor could we tell you what he wanted to do in his next job, or what he felt he was unusually qualified to do, or what he was passionate about or with what particular companies or organizations he was hoping to do this activity at some point in the future.

Okay, all that is not entirely true; I did glean some idea of what he does. As my mother says about any guy who labors in the technology sector, “He works with computers.”

Your 2011 Marketing Plan, Part 2: Setting Goals the SMART Way

“Begin with the end in mind.”
- Steven Covey

In my previous post, Your 2011 Marketing Plan, Part 1: The Value of Setting Goals and Planning, I addressed the importance of setting goals. At this time, I’d like to take it a step further by discussing how to set meaningful and measurable goals that become a critical part of a successful marketing plan.

But first, I’d like to step back and take note of what I believe are the two most compelling takeaways of that previous post. First, as personal development guru Brian Tracy tells us, people who set down written goals are significantly more successful than those who do not. And second, despite this evidence, just 3% of us actually go through the process of setting down written goals and tracking our progress toward them in a methodical manner.

Why is this? Perhaps setting goals seems pointless; perhaps tracking them seems difficult. Whatever the reasons behind this anomaly, it’s undeniable that for lawyers and other businesspeople the stakes involved are much higher than whether they lose that last ten pounds or run a 10K at a particular pace. In fact, the high failure rate of new ventures is testament to the inability of many entrepreneurs to effectively set marketing goals and track their progress in achieving them.

Your 2011 Marketing Plan, Part 1: The Value of Setting Goals & Planning

If you don’t know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else.

- Yogi Berra

It must be the end of the year already, because all the articles and blog posts about setting goals and planning are starting to appear. And guess what: This is yet another one.

Hey, I heard that groan. And I see how you’re beginning to turn the virtual page to find some other article or story that you feel might actually teach you something.

But wait. This could be the most important and even life-changing blog post that you’ll ever read, if it encourages you to take action. Because – as study after study has shown – goal setters are significantly more successful than everyone else. (By the way, that’s not thought to be coincidental.) And yet, if you’re like an estimated 97% of the population, you’re not a goal setter. And that’s too bad, because here’s what goal setters do:

1.     Write out specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-sensitive goals for the year ahead,

2.     Break them down into tasks and sub-tasks, and plot out on a calendar how they’re going to achieve each one,

3.     Revisit their plan on an ongoing basis to measure the progress they’re making, and

4.     Review their goals throughout the process to ensure that they’re still the right ones.

The Importance of a Strategic Approach to Law Firm Marketing in an Era of Change, Uncertainty and Increasing Competition

Jim Collins

By now, it’s fairly well understood that we are living through a period of great change and uncertainty. As Peter Winick proclaims in a recent post, uncertainty is now permanent. While I tend to be somewhat hesitant about calling anything permanent, it appears that for most people in the workforce today – and for almost anyone in the legal profession – uncertainty driven by growing competition will be an increasingly large part of our reality going forward. In fact, Winick notes that business guru Jim Collins – not someone prone to exaggerate – recently stated that “uncertainty is now the rule and not the exception.”

Fair enough, but what does this mean to you? What does it have to do with the challenges you’re facing in running a law firm? And what does any of this have to do with marketing?

First, this means you need to assume that change and uncertainty will be with us for a long time to come. Second, much of that change is going to involve increased competition, which will come from across town, from across the world and from technology – as well as from various combinations of these sources. Third, an environment of continually increasing competition should be sufficient incentive for every lawyer and law firm to focus on figuring out how they’re going to stand out and succeed.

What’s Next for BigLaw? Revolution is in the Air – and the Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO) Firms Shall Lead It

“In retrospect, all revolutions seem inevitable. Beforehand, all revolutions seem impossible.”

— Michael McFaul, National Security Council

We are in the midst of a true revolution in the delivery of legal services. And upon reading that, it’s likely that you will fall into one of two camps: those who have already heard the guns firing and who are nodding their heads in agreement, and those who dismiss all the warnings of imminent change as excessive and overwrought.

If you’re part of the first group, I look forward to hearing your reports from the front lines. If you’re part of the second group, and it strikes you as hyperbole that anything could really change the legal industry in this country, in our lifetimes, please read on. Because many of those sounding the alarms happen to be more Paul Revere than Chicken Little.

Take Bruce MacEwen, for one. If you don’t know Bruce, you should. He is the talent behind the thought-provoking Adam Smith, Esq. blog, which looks at far-reaching trends in the legal profession. As the name of his blog implies, he is interested in the business and economics of law. Forgive me for stealing from the old E.F. Hutton ads, but when Bruce speaks, people listen.

And so, when Bruce said, “Outsourcing is here to stay” in a recent post, it’s worth paying attention. He was not talking about software development. He was talking about legal services that have always been provided by top-tier law firms to their corporate clients. But now there’s a new vendor of legal services in the room and it’s not a traditional law firm. It’s another animal altogether that some have labeled Legal Process Outsourcing (LPO).

Bruce continues, “Whatever you call it, and whatever you think of its quality, clients have tasted the fruit of the forbidden tree and they’re not going back. If document review can be conducted by Ivy League law school grads…for $50/hour instead of $350/hour, what’s not for a client to like?”