We’re closing in on the end of the year. And, with that in mind, I recall a conversation I had with an office manager who had recently ended a long-term personal relationship. At the time, she said words I have been repeating ever since, “This is a year for big changes, but change can be good.”
While I’m writing this, the stock market, where many of us have invested for our children’s college tuition and our retirement, has been on a roller-coaster ride. We’ll have a new president in early 2009 and possibly other major changes in our political landscape, depending on the election results. The domino effects of the economy and changes in the government and around the world will be sure to have impacts on our work and home lives.
While some areas of law boom in a bad economy, many slow down dramatically; others are faced with cash-flow problems created by long-time clients who’ve been hurt by the economic downturn. Among my clients, which are predominately law firms, some have asked for more time to pay outstanding bills; others have asked to delay previously scheduled projects.
If you are experiencing a slow-down in legal work, you may want to consider using the downtime to your advantage. Over the years, many firms have invested in billing and case management programs. Typically, these firms purchased programs to solve specific issues within their office. For example, a firm may have purchased a practice management program because it needed the ability to share calendars and connect events to their firm’s cases. Usually, once the firm has addressed that initial issue, it operated on autopilot, continuing to use that product the same way for years and years. The same is true of a firm’s other basic computer applications.
A slowdown is a good opportunity to take stock of how your firm operates, and review and revise procedures and use of technology.
For example, we’re approaching the time to send holiday cards to clients and colleagues. If you have a program like Time Matters, you can use it to select the people and organizations you want on your list as well as to prepare either envelopes or labels. Practice management programs like Time Matters, Amicus Attorney, Practice Master, Legal Files, Prolaw and many others allow you to add custom fields so you can designate which contacts to include in mailings. Most of these products also allow you to print envelopes or labels directly from these products, bypassing the need to merge this information into your word processor.
Mailing shortcuts
If your office sends holiday cards, you could order envelopes that feed directly into the printer to save the extra steps of printing the list as labels and then affixing them onto envelopes. I’m sure I’m not alone in considering ways to cut down on the time, effort and expense of holiday mailings, especially this year. For personal cards, many of the photo sites like Shutterfly and Snapfish encourage customers to send them their lists and they will mail the cards you’ve printed through their service.
Similarly, online services like evite.com let you invite and manage recipients to parties. These services can be linked to gift registries or a site to share photos with attendees.
Personal handwritten cards seem to be a thing of the past. With the technology tools available at our fingertips, old-fashioned notes and letters have increasingly been replaced by e-mail and correspondence done as merges in word processors. Again, the practice management products, as well as the contact relationship management (CRM) products like InterAction used at larger firms, make it easy for firms to slice and dice their contact lists to send very targeted e-mail messages to clients, potential clients and referral sources. Services like Constant Comment provide new ways to stay in touch with clients. These services offer templates and online storage for your contact list so you can send professional looking e-mail to clients, potential clients, and other people and organizations that refer work to your firm.
Remote access
There are many affordable products that allow you to connect remotely with your own desktop, your office or to clients. Remote desktop is built into the Windows operating system and is relatively easy to configure and secure. If you tend to connect from different locations, you may want to look at Logmein or GotoMyPC as commercial remote-access solutions. For collaborating with clients, there are programs like Webex and GoToMeeting that allow you to connect online and by telephone with one or many people to share documents, information on computer screens or transfer documents. These tools let you connect with or without advanced scheduling and save all participants time and expense.
Sites like MySpace and Facebook are beginning to move from personal networking tools to a way to manage business relationships. The use of these tools by the political campaigns has moved people who would not otherwise have joined these online networking communities to become members. How these will evolve as business tools is just beginning to be seen. As they develop, new concepts and communities such as Twitter and blogs focused on business development or local communities may provide creative ways for lawyers to stay in touch with clients and to reach new ones.
LinkedIn has begun to make headway in allowing people to connect with others directly and indirectly in their personal network. On LinkedIn, you can enter key information about yourself into your profile, such as the college you attended. You can then search other members of LinkedIn to find former classmates or other links within your life. LinkedIn includes tools to let you compare your address book to friends and colleagues who have accounts with LinkedIn. It feels like an online version of “six degrees of separation.”
You can search for someone you know and then see who is linked to that person and find common links or make new connections. According to its website, there are 30 million people with LinkedIn accounts. The site recently announced groups, which may be an interesting way to collaborate with clients and related professionals. As I learn more about LinkedIn, I’m finding many opportunities to expand my business network and in turn expand my business opportunities.
YouTube for you
I’ve even seen creative use of YouTube by technology businesses. For example, I attended a seminar this summer that included a demonstration of the steps to install and configure an application. At the end of the presentation, the speaker shared a link to a video he had created and posted on YouTube that showed the steps involved. The beauty of YouTube for this application is that when I need to review the steps to install and configure this application, I can review it at my leisure rather than review the detailed notes I took. I have thought about placing mini-tutorial sessions on specific technology topics on YouTube to share with clients and potential clients.
Of course, it goes without saying that your firm should have a website that goes beyond being the equivalent of an online brochure. You should think about what image you present to both current and potential clients. Think about ways to update your information.
Successful websites are those that people return to again and again. Think about where you go online when seeking information both related to work and for other information. Look at other law firms’ sites and figure out what you like and dislike about them. You may find that minor changes to your site can result in big improvements in sharing information about your expertise with potential clients.
Many of the ideas here require little or no cash investment. Most require an investment of time to learn about them and determine how they may fit best with marketing and promoting your business.
