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Interesting results posted recently in The Strongest Law Firm Brands in the Land which delineates a study on law firm brand recognition by brand research company, Acritas? The question mark is intended because the most mentioned firms in telephone interviews with high-revenue clients, of at least $1 billion, are not surprising. The results included Skadden, Jones Day, Kirkland & Ellis, Sidley Austin, and Wachtell.

Various questions were asked, including which firm the GC and AGC respondents would hire for bet-the-company matters, which the respondents’ have more favorable attitude towards and which they would hire for large M&A matters. The rankings apparently changed slightly on favorability as opposed to which were best known.

Place Still Counts.

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It’s a done deal. If you are in law practice and want new clients or a way to maintain your reputation and expertise in the world at large, you need to be using social media. However, as with all marketing or reputation management tools, it is necessary and important to have a social media strategy.

One. Do Plan. It is essential to plan your social media communications. Remember that getting out there in social media is essential, but if you want your efforts to be effective, you must plan. Just like you would a case or trial strategy. Social media is like any other communications or media vehicle, it needs to be controlled. Don’t let a frantic push to get into the social media conversation, keep you from planning your road to relevancy and value.

Two. Related to One above, Don’t Just Sign Up. Do not sign up for every service out there that will allow you to connect with your potential market. Research the way each social media community works. Make sure that the content you post is relevant to the community and that your time gaining visibility is not wasted.

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We all know by now that networks are critical to our business success and that the web has made our networking more dynamic. But the basics still apply, even as we are experiencing instant gratification — like when we reach out to contacts on LinkedIn and we are instantly linked to former colleagues and new contacts when they accept our request to connect.

What are the basics? One of them is, don’t abandon your network. If you are on a site like LinkedIn for example, it’s unwise to assume that just because you have a hefty roster in your network, it means much.

Networks need to be nurtured. So just like the things that hopefully we learned as kids, we need to be gracious and communicative or our networks can languish.

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582334_rain_falling_in_the_waterI am intrigued by Josh Erlich’s recent piece in the HBR Blog Network, For Great Leadership, Clear Your Head. It is well worth considering his rationale for what he calls “mindshifting” — in which he persuasively advocates that in order for senior executives to best do their jobs, thinking time is key.

WIthout having done a scientific study, I would bet that many good ideas are formulated when we put down the devices. Why? Because at times our minds need a break from the onslaught of incoming information to get to the big ideas.

“Mindshifting” is purposeful reflection that has a methodology and includes, among others, some common sense steps that most executives, managers and busy professionals in leadership positions likely do not think is value-time. And replicating that reflective time is essential for the first step for the successful mind shift … which is key, Erlich says, for strategy to percolate.

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Networks have a mind of their own. When they work as they should, they can enhance our business lives in very big ways. But they can also pull focus and time away from other important business development efforts.

Networks are not created overnight and then need attention. Left neglected, they can languish and fall away.

Recently, I came across a fine piece in the Harvard Business Review about people with really successful networks and why and how they work. In their piece Managing Yourself: A Smarter Way to Network, the authors describe the key attributes of really good networks and the people who use them wisely and well.

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Full disclosure: I am the sort of person who gets off the plane in DC and heads directly to the National Archives before doing anything else. I wholeheartedly admit that I am a fan of seeing these documents up close and personal and have been asked by security to “move along” as I stand mesmerized by their enormity.

Apparently, not many young Americans would likely beg their parents to head to the Archives. But they probably all should go there before stopping elsewhere in our beautiful capital city.

This year, the ABA is focusing its educational effort on civics education for young Americans. The ABA has noted that many of us are not as well-versed as we should be in the documents that are at the core of our Democracy.

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Last week, McElhaney on Litigation posted a piece in the ABA Journal about effective trial lawyers and their ability to tell a story. He makes the point that “lawyers who want to become effective communicators must understand that stories are at the heart of how people think, learn, exchange ideas and struggle to understand the world around them.”

Professional Stories Are Compelling, Facts are Just That


I totally agree with this premise and want to extrapolate out to the importance of storytelling in effective marketing communications for both lawyers and law firms.

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Avoid the overwhelming and daunting task of establishing a business or professional social media presence with this excellent post by a seasoned marketer. This is a reasoned list of considerations that will help anyone trying to work through a social media strategy.

This valuable advice applies to many other communications efforts and is particularly helpful for marketing and communications professionals trying to make social media work for our clients, firms and businesses.

Briefly summarized, these five important recommendations include that social media users should: set goals, have realistic expectations about results, take on one social media site at a time, be consistent about attending to profiles, and schedule social media activity as a regular part of the work day.

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When the DOJ recently subpoenaed Twitter for access to the accounts related to Mr. Assange, as well as other individuals involved with WikiLeaks, we were all reminded that there are evidentiary components to our social media posts.

It wasn’t that long ago that we were frantically disseminating usage policies to employees, law firm personnel and clients on the perils of the electronic age, including the new fangled electronic discovery. Once you have seen captured emails in major litigations and investigations, you ask yourself: Did these executives fail to realize that these emails exist in perpetuity?

We have migrated from what only recently was “web 2.0” to a sophisticated social media world that has quickly matured far beyond our expectations perhaps.

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The time has come to admit to ourselves the significance of social media and the fact that it is not going to get less important. There is a place for social media in the legal profession and lots of us know we just need to accept it and dig in.

Recently I asked a very bright young adult (24) with a social media job a at a tech giant, why she values sites like Twitter and Facebook. She said she “loves it” because it allows her to have, what I would call various “communities of interest” in all areas of her interests such as news, work and entertainment. But more than this, it allows her to see what matters to the people in her network — and to use that as a way to know more about things she might never otherwise see or learn.

I finally got it. Social media replicates and enhances interactions within communities that are multi-dimensional. Rather than getting a link to an interesting article and seeing that in one dimension, social media allows us to see who else cares about an issue and even better, enhances our community depth and breadth. For example, not only does one of my formidable FB “friends” have a journalistic background in tech and science, he presents his research “finds” to our FB community and we enhance that by our knowledge base. In other words: we learn about cool stuff we never knew about before.

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