The pros and cons of working with prepaid legal plans
First off, what is a prepaid legal plan?
Some companies offer a legal insurance plan similar to medical insurance. The employee pays into the plan and if they ever need a lawyer for a prenup, real estate closing, wills and trust, bankruptcy, etc., they can call up their legal service provider and ask for a referral to an attorney that is in the network.
Some of the pros of being listed with one or more prepaid legal plan such as ARAG or Hyatt is that when you’re a new solo, you need every source of income you could get. Prepaid legal plans will provide you with much needed referrals similar to what you would get from a Lawyer Referral Service with the Massachusetts Bar Association or the Boston Bar Association. Along with getting more clients you will get the necessary experience to better help clients in the future. Lastly, these services will always pay so there’s no fear of non-payment by the client.
The con of being listed with one of these prepaid legal plans is that they generally pay very low rates. They have a set fee structure and it’s sometimes half or 1/10th of what you would normally charge for a similar matter. In the beginning of your practice, you might find that it’s better than no business at all and it’s a calculated move to get clients through the door.
Another thing to keep in mind is that these prepaid legal plan clients might refer you cases from a friend or relative that does not have legal insurance and therefore you can charge them your regular rates.
Marketing against ROI
* This tip was first published by the Massachusetts Bar Association: Tip of the week on 12/17/2009
ROI is “Return on Investment”. It is a measure of how successful your investment is in any given venture. In the context of attorney marketing, you want to be able to measure how well a particular investment (marketing strategy) is. Is that yellow page ad generating business? Is that new Web site bringing new clients? That’s easy to measure by simply asking your clients where they first found your information.
Every summer, my firm invests in marketing through participation in area elder fairs and also cultural fairs. I routinely go out to engage the public, to meet with them at these events and speak with passersby and answer their legal questions, for free. I have not yet gotten a single client that has told me they’ve hired me from seeing me at those events. But yet I keep doing it year after year. Am I a fool? Perhaps. Am I wasting my money? No.
Malcolm Gladwell has a classic discussion of why Coca Cola dominates market shares over Pepsi. It is not because Coca Cola tastes better because when given the “Pepsi Challenge,” most people actually prefer the taste of Pepsi over Coca Cola. The reason why Coke dominates is because of its brand. Its brand is so pervasive that you would be hard pressed to find anyone on earth that won’t recognize the name.
All things being equal, when a new client sees your ad and they see your competitor’s ad, you want them to pick you. People choose products that they know, whether it’s a conscious or subconscious choice. The more they’ve seen something, the more likely they’ll pick it. So, why do I continue to do those fairs during the summer? Because though they don’t know it, people recognize me and when they see an ad of mine down the road, they pick me not because my ad is so much better or because I am more qualified, but because they recognize me as a brand.
Go out and engage your client base. Make your name and your presence pervasive.
This tip is courtesy of Gabriel Cheong, attorney at law, owner of Infinity Law Group.
Creating effective print ads
*This post appeared in the Massachusetts Bar Association’s weekly e-Journal: Tip of the week on 12/3/2009
The future of legal marketing is no doubt on the Internet, whether it’s through Web sites, blogging, social media, twitter or videos. However, that doesn’t mean print ads are dead and gone. There might be situations where it’s appropriate or certain demographics that you can only reach through traditional print advertisement. But just because you’re using traditional print advertisements, doesn’t mean you should be traditional in how you approach it.
Look at any attorney print ad in the phone book or church pamphlet or wherever else they show up, what’s the biggest thing featured on the ad? It’s probably the attorney’s picture and their name. Now ask yourself, when a client is searching for an attorney, do they care more about what your name is or do they care about what their situation is and how you can help them?
Instead of making your name the biggest part of any ad, try instead making the practice areas of your firm the main focus. After all, that is what your client is mainly looking for.
This tip is courtesy of Gabriel Cheong, attorney at law, owner of Infinity Law Group.
Will a Law Firm Associate Do a Better Job For You Than a Solo?
* Guest post by Jonas Jacobson, member of SOS. Visit Jonas’ website at http://jonasjacobson.com/
Here’s a better question: who would you rather have work on your case? The partner who owns a law firm? Or an associate who works for the partner?
Nine times out of ten, I would, personally, choose the partner. After all, if the partner owns the firm, he is invested in the success of his business. He will go to great lengths to prove to you how successful he can be for you. The partner profits most if his firm succeeds, and fails if it does not.
An associate may work hard, and may be bright – but her focus will always be on impressing the partner. Your matter, to the extent it is important to the partner, will likely be very important to the associate, but it will not be the engine that drives the associate’s work, most likely.
After all, consider: associates are often directed to do many different tasks by law firm partners, and must therefore prioritize (and here’s the important point) what might be most important to the partner.
Consider for a moment why large law firms recruit out of our nation’s elite colleges and universities. Sure those schools are prestigious, and sure, there is a great likelihood that the smartest students, who ideally will become the smartest lawyers, will enroll. That doesn’t get to the real core issue of why they are hired, however.
They are hired because there are no guarantees as to how passionate an associate might be. The closest thing a hiring law firm has to a guarantee on an associates future passion for the firm and the law is prestige. “She ought to care because she went to Harvard.” Prestige is a kind of proxy for passion.
And while, to a point, there are arguments that can be made about success in law school being indicia of success as a lawyer, those arguments are only good to a point. Why? Because success in the law is directly correlated to the amount of work an attorney puts into a matter.
Well, hard work and the facts the client gives the attorney to work with.
Given equally valid arguments, the more time a litigator spends on a matter, the more likely she is to be succesful at trial. There is always more precedent out there, after all. Likewise, the more time your estate attorney spends with you, reviewing your plans, the more sensible an estate plan you are likely to have.
Thus for me, a solo attorney makes a great deal of sense. As a client, I want someone who will work extremely hard for me, and who will care about impressing me. I want someone who is beholden to me, and not some third party. At the end of the day, your lawyer should be someone you like, and trust, and if you go with a solo, you know who your lawyer is.
Marketing Using Twitter
* This article appeared in the MBA Lawyers’ e-Journal: Tip of the Week on 11/5/2009.
Twitter was the “it” kid on the block when it got started and up until this year. Then statistics came out that pointed to the fact that most Twitter accounts registered were NOT being used on a regular basis and a majority of the “tweets” come from a minority of tweeters (Twitter lingo). Add to that, many legal business and marketing gurus didn’t know exactly how Twitter could help market a law firm and if they did make a claim that it was beneficial, they didn’t have hard numbers to prove it.
Then last month, Google and Bing revitalized Twitter as a marketing tool. In their usual epic battle of Microsoft vs. Google, Microsoft’s new Bing search engine struck a deal with Twitter to start indexing their site. In the same day, Google made the same announcement that it will now start to index Twitter.
What does that all mean for legal marketing?
It means that individual tweets can now show up as searches in Google or Bing. So if you tweet something about your particular substantive area of law, there is a possibility that it will get picked up by Google and Bing and if relevant enough to a user’s search terms, it will show in the search results.
If you haven’t started using twitter yet, now is as good a time as any to start and I predict that many more firms will start to see direct results from their twittering over time. Tweet about your practice or the law. Tweet your blog posts. Retweet other interesting posts. Just start tweeting.
This tip is courtesy of Gabriel Cheong, attorney at law, owner of Infinity Law Group. Follow Gabriel on Twitter @GabrielCheong.