Court Filings, Decisions and Legal Articles : JD Supra : Cases, Briefs, Documents, Forms

A simple definition of marketing: "Getting someone who has a need to know, like, and trust you." (Italics are ours.)

The language comes from marketing coach John Jantsch (author of Duct Tape Marketing) by way of Joe Pulizzi in a post yesterday at Pulizzi's excellent Junta42 blog.

Pulizzi recently attended a presentation by Jantsch; yesterday's post is a recap of the event, a must-read not only for small business marketers and entrepreneurs, but for anyone who is interested in making the most of online technologies to reach new clients. To reach someone with a need.

Despite the slightly awkward construction, we like this simple explanation of marketing - it brings your audience front-and-center: "someone who has a need." And it focuses on your job in the transaction: "getting [them] to know, like, and trust you."

In our particular context "someone who has a need" is easy to understand: people have a daily need for legal information and legal services. (You know this already.)

So the question becomes: how do you get all of those people to notice you?

Share your work. It speaks for itself as one of the best examples of your excellence and expertise.

And cast a wide net. Don't simply build a profile, upload two documents from a recent project, and wait for something to happen.

Be proactive - it's how to stand out in an online crowd. The more you share the more you increase your odds of making a connection with someone looking for legal information. That is the nature of content marketing. That is how to start a relationship with someone (a colleague, a new client, a referral)  that potentially leads to being known, trusted, liked - and we should add: employed.
 

Jason "The Content Librarian" Eiseman recently called attention to a March Newsweek piece speculating on the future of user generated content, titled Revenge of the Experts. As Jason so succinctly puts it:

The gist of the article is that the current trend of user-generated content is on the way out in favor of a renewed interest in expert-vetted content.

The report has generated discussion (read some of it here at Lost Remote). Jason disagrees with the thesis; a point of view he expresses in no uncertain terms.

It is frankly difficult to agree with a piece of journalism that declares "The expert is back" (did the expert ever really go away?) but we are always pleased to see conversation around the topic of user generated content.

Filtering (vetting) matters; we imagine few people would argue with that. (How truly useful to most of us is an unconstrained fire hydrant of raw information?) Luckily, innovations over the years - layer upon layer upon layer - have provided Internet users with outstanding alternatives to the kind of filtering once done solely by news editors in an "old media" world. We suspect there's no going back - and that there is room for everyone.

Filtering is, among other things, a way of determining value. There are many ways to make that determination - expertise, authority, popularity, and peer review are just a few taking center stage online today.

At JD Supra, our particular brand of user generated content is valuable because it is the work of experts - lawyers and other members of the legal community. The content in our directory arrives online with the credibility of having been generated by professionals who are, in essence, already vetted. (Look at their case decisions and professional and academic credentials for more on this.) And every piece of work is attributed to its credible source - court filings, briefs, articles, and alerts are linked to professional profiles, and vice versa.

The value of the work is obvious - which makes the value of sharing it obvious, too.

JD Supra founding contributor, Havkins, Rosefeld, Ritzert & Varriale, recently opened a new office in White Plains, New York. They wanted everyone to know about it, and, especially, to get the word out about the partner leading their new office - Tara Fappiano.  Sure, they issued a press release. But HRRV didn't stop there. They also created a JD Supra profile for Tara, listing the new office location, and posting documents (an article and decision) that demonstrate Tara's experience and success in her practice area of insurance defense for construction accidents. 

Smart. Long after the buzz generated by the press release dies down,Tara's JD Supra profile and her growing record of documents will continue to announce the existence of HRRV's White Plains office.

Congratulations to HRRV and to Tara Fappiano on their new office and their marketing savvy.

We've been thinking lately about this question posed by Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends: when did online marketing become so complex?

To simplify matters, Ms. Campbell experiments with an explanation of online marketing that relies on a series of concentric circles - the high priority options are in the middle, lowest priority on the outer edges. (Forgive the easy jest, but for a moment it occurred to us that anyone already confused by this topic might just see something akin to Dante's Inferno. And we don't want that, now do we?)

We think that the circles make sense from the point of view of many businesses. (Website at bullseye; that's where most of their online efforts start.) But what seems more important is the point of view of the consumer.

And from the consumer's point of view, things aren't especially concentric.

How does a prospective client piece together an online picture of your business? If they don't know your web address (or maybe even if they do), they search. It may be a search of your firm's name, an attorney's name, or even of a subject relevant to your practice. And, the search may even be started on one of the websites listed in Anita's outer circles.

Consider a page, or the first few pages, of search results. (For example, use the results generated by a query on your firm's name.) For one thing, there's nothing circular about the listings. For another, your website might be included in the early results (might not be), but we're betting that not everyone goes to it first.

What else is included in those results? If you've been casting a wide net online - participating in a number of places - it's likely that some of Ms. Campbell's outer-circle marketing options also appear on the early pages. Depending on the search term and other factors, possibly even above your website. That makes them high priority opportunities.

Think like a consumer. It's another way to begin to understand the online marketing options available to you. Do you have a compelling presence in all the places your prospective clients might find or in which they might go looking? If your website is your most valued online marketing asset, the center of your efforts, what do you do to make them want to visit your website when they get to these places, and do you make it easy for them to get there?

We're grateful to Carolyn Elefant at MyShingle for including us in her post on the subject - a thoughtful take on it all, with legal marketing in mind.

Ms. Elefant uses the term "landing point" and this seems right. The nature of the web today is such that your site is actually just one of several landing points for people looking for information about you or the subjects in which you specialize. (Luckily, you have the ability to cover yourself by participating in many of them, even connecting them to each other, and to your own website.)

If what happens during the course of online discovery can be described using a series of circles, that's fine - but the seekers determine what goes into each circle depending on where they land first and click next; they will only end up at your virtual door if there are compelling paths from each of their landing points to lead them there. 

Two recent posts by Kevin O'Keefe at Lexblog caught our attention. (You should be reading Kevin daily if you're not already: real lawyers not only have blogs, they also read 'em.)

The first responds to the perceived difficulty of generating good (marketing) content. A  case for blogs, the post included the following points which especially resonate with our thinking here at JD Supra:

• Lawyers like the immediacy of seeing content on [the] net. They see something they want to share with clients, prospective clients, bloggers, and reporters and it's up in a day - or even immediately.
• [The] viral marketing bounce of blogs motivates lawyers. Content found on Google. Calls from reporters. Requests to speak at conferences. Content automatically syndicated to third party publications...

Kevin's other post is a response to the notion, paraphrased here, that the only reason for an online presence (blog, website, whatever) is to achieve high rankings in Google. Incorrect, says Kevin - and we agree with him.

The various networking and publishing tools available online today are indeed highly effective (for referrals, exposure, networking, marketing, promotion - you name it), but  they mean nothing if not backed up by quality work.  To whit:

Rise above the pack. Be the lawyer you want to be in the area of law for which you have a passion... Establish a reputation that's not fleeting. It can be done via online networking through effective blogging - not by just being at the top of Google.

Strong arguments not only for blogging but also for posting your daily work - briefs, articles, and the rest - online.  If a good blog post takes less than half an hour to write, consider how long it takes to upload a document already created during the course of your work, that shows in clear terms your expertise and quality level. Mere minutes.

One blog post won't establish your reputation; blogging for the sake of blogging won't establish your reputation, either. But over time, if you use the online tools available to you - use them for all they are worth (and that's a lot!) - you can effectively extend your brand, your reputation, online.

We're with Kevin. Start a blog. But also let your daily work speak for itself. When next you go looking for new marketing content, start with the documents already at your disposal. Build a professional profile and get them online.

In other words: Give Content. Get Noticed.

 At JD Supra we like the term content marketing. It describes one key service of our user-generated legal research directory. Lawyers and members of the legal community share their content in order to build the directory (briefs, articles, decisions, filings) - and as a result they're able to market themselves to anyone using the directory by calling attention to one of the most compelling pieces of marketing material available to them, their product, their expertise, the written evidence of their daily work.

But, there's more to it. You - not just your legal documents - are part of the story. Undoubtedly you've seen it written in other ways in the marketing books and on blogs ("You are your own brand!"). At JD Supra, think of it like this: via your professional profile, you are your first piece of content in content marketing. (Consider that the profile is not just available to visitors at JDSupra.com; often it is also what people see when they, to borrow a phrase, "Google" you.)

Meaning? Take full advantage of your JD Supra profile. Make it human, tell a story, stand out in the crowd. Definitely include your academic and professional accreditations, your employment history, your publications, your professional successes - referrals and prospective clients will want to see all of this information - but also use the page to paint the whole picture. Describe how you make a difference, how you made a difference. Don't just give your title; explain your role. (And if you are part of a large firm with a single presence on JD Supra, stand up and create your very own profile.)

There is no single way to do this. Quoted from active JD Supra profiles, here are a few varied examples of the kind of extra language we think makes a difference:

"Some of my cases involve representing petitioners and aliens where the CIS has denied (or revoked its approval of) a petition, and who are advised by the agency that 'there is no appeal from this decision.' It has been my pleasure to prove them wrong on several occasions."
- Edward Reisman

"A law firm founded by six Muslim women, they realized, was likely a first in the nation, and indeed, their investigation confirmed their suspicions. Carrying this banner and their passion for the law, the partners understood that they were paving a new path for future Muslim women, providing society an example ... and giving hope to a community ..."
- Amal Law Group

"Hagan’s research continues to fuse crime and justice issues, examining the projection of human rights advocacy in an era characterized by the increasing perpetration of war crimes. His current work on Darfur argues that criminology has too long neglected crimes against humanity and genocide, 'the crime of crimes.'"
- John Hagan

How are you telling your story?

JD Supra contributors were busy sharing their insightful newsletters and articles last month.  Here's a roundup of some of the most popular recent posts:

• Patent Happenings, the monthly newsletter of Latimer, Mayberry & Matthews IP Law LLP, providing in-depth analysis of judicial, legislative, and administrative developments in patent law. (April 1, 2008, issue is available here.)
  
• Monthly articles from Lane Powell PC covering breaking developments in the firm's diverse practice areas including insurance, environmental law, taxation, health, finance & banking, construction law, labor & employment, and a host of other subjects.
• Immigration Law Alerts - regular alerts, advisories, and updates, from the Mintz Levin Immigration Group.
• SecuritiesBrief Spring 2008 - one of the many securities updates and intellectual property law articles (including InBrief and others) published by Lang Michener LLP. 
• An article on the Writer's Guild Strike discussing the resolution and its legal implications, by Troy Gould entertainment law attorney, Jonathan Handel.
•  MoFo Tax Talk, a timely new publication from Morrison & Foerster.
  

The old, million dollar question has been: 'Where do you find your clients?"
 
But a simple rephrasing can make all the difference to understanding the current power of online technologies available to all of us.

The new question, what you should be asking: "Where do your clients find you?"

It is a mind shift at the core of what is so powerful today about legal content marketing in an online environment. You don't always find your clients; more often they find you.

What are you doing about that? Maybe that's the real question.

When you consider that more than a quarter of all Americans turn to the Internet to find information about legal matters (comScore Study, 2006), you begin to see the meaning in JD Supra's tagline: "Give Content. Get Noticed."

JD Supra has been open to the public for just over a month. In that time visitors have been directed to our growing database of legal documents and professional profiles for a variety of reasons. A quick scan of external searches that brought people to JD Supra (the queries coming to us but originating elsewhere, at sites like Google and Yahoo!) shows that in March, 2008, people spent significant time online looking for information on, among things

- estate planning,
- naturalization,
- privacy,
- real estate,
- taxes,
- legal definitions,

and so on. (Check back: in future we will break it down even further, with lists of some of the most popular external and internal searches.)

If you're not already doing so, you should be participating in this.

Recently the Electronic Privacy Information Center joined the ranks at JD Supra. To learn more about this public interest group, please visit their profile page. One of EPIC's first posted documents was a Complaint for Injunctive Relief challenging the Federal Trade Commission in its actions to do with the Google-Doubleclick merger (for more details, download the document here.) The Complaint was tagged as newsworthy and as a result appeared in our Hot Document section - JD Supra's media source of the latest newsworthy filings (also available via RSS feed).

Within two hours of uploading, Executive Director Marc Rotenberg was on the phone with someone from the National Law Journal, who had found the Complaint on JD Supra. (We learned this from Mr. Rotenberg, who emailed us a note of thanks.) The result: a mention in the NLJ's IN BRIEF for March 24, 2008, titled "Suit centers on possible conflict in Google deal." (The piece is available here with paid NLJ subscription.)

That, in a nutshell, is JD Supra's Hot Documents section at work. If you are uploading something that deserves media attention, we encourage you to tag it as a "Hot Document."  And, before you prepare document summaries with the media in mind, be sure to read Jordan Furlong's writing tips on the subject. Give content. Get noticed.

Tomorrow: Content marketing with consumers in mind. What's the real question you should be asking yourself?

JD Supra is happy to announce the arrival of two new contributors, each a luminary in the legal marketing field and, despite the following short biographies, really in no need of an introduction:

Often described as the grandfather (and godfather) of Internet legal marketing, Gregory Siskind is the founder of Siskind Susser Bland, one of the largest immigration law firms in North America. He is also a co-founder of Visalaw International - the Global Immigration Law Alliance - and works with many of the world's top immigration specialists assisting companies and individuals to relocate anywhere in the world. Mr. Siskind is the very definition of an early adapter and has leveraged the power of content marketing via online technologies for more than a decade. The Siskind Susser Bland site, launched in June, 1994, "was the first immigration law firm web site and one of the very first law firm web sites in any category." The firm was also the first to distribute their newsletters using listserv and one the first to serve clients via Internet voice and video conferencing. Mr. Siskind is the author of, among other publications, The Lawyers Guide to Marketing on the Internet. You can read his blog here.

Bruce W. Marcus is a pioneer in law firm and professional services marketing. He is the publisher and editor of the online publication The Marcus Letter and the blog, The Marcus Perspective. His writing has appeared in major business, professional, and financial publications, and he has been a regular columnist for several Microsoft industry pages. Mr. Marcus has been a speech writer for many of the Fortune 500 companies, and major national political figures, including Robert Kennedy and Senator Jacob Javits, and was the author of a major report for President Carter. As a marketing consultant and strategic market planner, he has served a diversified clientele that includes most of the Big Four accounting firms and their predecessors, and many major law firms. It is always an extraordinary pleasure to read precise thinking well captured by precise writing - Mr. Marcus typifies the very best of such precision. Be careful: start with just one of his excellent newsletters (available here) and you will find yourself sucked in and thoroughly enjoying them all.

[The above passages borrow language from their respective JD Supra profiles, as well as www.visalaw.com.]

Content marketing is not the wave of the future - it is the essential marketing tool of the present  - and JD Supra contributors are on the crest of this wave.

As Joe Pulizzi reports,"Marketing today is all about publishing":

Leading marketing organizations such as IBM and Siemens are focusing the majority of their time, attention and resources on the creation and distribution of their own content to customers and prospects .

. . . By providing this type of content marketing and setting up the building blocks for a long-term relationship, the opportunity is now available to actually sell your solutions, because they trust you, have a stake in your brand, and believe in your solutions-oriented message.

The whole idea of this, even ten years ago, would seem like the hard way to increase sales. Today, it's the only way.

Just yesterday, Brian Ritchey of More Partner Income also wrote about the increasing role of substantive content provision in business marketing, and the importance of "information-driven business development for law firms" (the post does not seem to be available today). While Brian primarily focused on blogs, the leading marketing organizations are not only blogging, they are creating "relevant and compelling content consistently, and in multiple formats" and syndicating that content on other websites.

The best news of all - unlike IBM and Siemens, we don't need to expend enormous resources to create compelling content - as lawyers, our product is content, and with JD Supra, it is easier than ever to get that content in front of prospective clients in a way they can easily access.

In a recent post, Steve Matthews showed how The Scoop section on JD Supra creates an excellent opportunity for you to showcase your work directly to the media.

Indeed, we built The Scoop specifically to generate media attention for our contributors and to give reporters and editors hot leads on new stories with a steady supply of "buzzworthy" legal documents, filings, and decisions before they're available anywhere else. This fresh source of legal news even has its own RSS feed.

Any JD Supra member can include a document in The Scoop by designating it as "Hot" during the posting process (on the document upload page). But if you do plan on participating, please start by reading these extraordinarily helpful writing tips, put together for the JD Supra community by lawyer and legal journalist Jordan Furlong.  "Think like a reporter." That's Mr. Furlong's first tip (and he would know: currently he serves as editor-in-chief of the Canadian Bar Association's magazine, National, and writes a blog at http://law21.ca). Additional tips (example: "Don't write like a lawyer") and samples of excellent document summaries are available for your consideration here.

We're thrilled and grateful that a member the legal media would not only be excited by The Scoop but go so far as to contribute writing tips to make it more useful and usable for his journalist colleagues. Thank you, Jordan Furlong.

[Stay tuned for an upcoming round-up of recent Scoops.]