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

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. 

Marketing guru Seth Godin asks in a recent blog post: Who answers the phone?

Godin's point? That with marketing, we're willing to prioritize considerable time and money on a new logo, a television ad (even a website!) - and yet often when it comes to the inbound telephone call, the prospect calling you:

the lowest-paid, least-respected, highest-turnover jobs in the organization now do the most important marketing work.

("The new rules mean that the most valuable marketing event is almost always an inbound phone call.")

The new rules.

The new rules also mean that you have an online presence, whether you've created one or not. Imagine: someone in your referral network mentions your name at a meeting or over dinner. What will that new prospect, that potential client, find when they follow up and Google you? You should be asking yourself this question. You should know the answer.

If someone goes online to put together a picture of you, what will they find? And have you done enough to influence the results?

For example, your website. It probably cost a lot to produce, but are you now doing anything to promote it - more importantly, to optimize it? Have you made the site easy to find? Is it listed anywhere? (Simple: the more high quality links, the better.)

What about all of the marketing collateral (newsletters and articles) you've spent enormous amounts of money producing in order to demonstrate your expertise? Any of it online? If not, why not? If yes, in how many places?

Do you have a professional profile? What does it say and include? Does it link to your website?

Can a prospect piece together a good portrait of you online - something substantive, demonstrating expertise and a level of quality? You should know the answer to this question, because in all likelihood they're trying to do exactly that - right now.

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.

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.]

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.]