Halloween, step aside. The legal marketer’s “scary season” is already well upon us. We are officially deep into Chambers season.

It’s now a well-established fact: In the digital era, niches bring riches. Law firms that focus on a particular industry or practice area stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace. 

If you're a marketer who has ever had an attorney ask why they can't just send out marketing emails using Outlook, this one's for you.

Often the biggest challenge to consistent thought leadership is getting the ideas and insights from attorneys. What challenges are their clients facing? What opportunities are ahead? Without this information, it's hard for marketers to plan for client alerts, case studies, blog posts and more.

While I’m the life of a party when I’m with my friends, I loathe networking events and dread small talk. Instead, I enjoy substantive conversations and don’t know how to achieve meaty, engaging discussions with people I don’t know very well.

There’s a well-known principle in business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing: Brands that have a higher “share of voice” than their “share of market” will grow. This is called the “excess share of voice” (ESOV) rule.

While thought leadership is a critical marketing strategy for law firms, it requires a new way of thinking and far more direct attorney involvement.  

Now is the time to improve your firm’s client alerts so you can take full advantage of this important marketing tool. In our latest blog post, we collected 10 of the best tips from top marketing influencers and summarized them for you. 

Welcome to 2021! We made it and everything is back to normal, right? *Oh how we wish that could be the case.* While this shiny new year doesn't erase everything that happened last year, it does give us an opportunity to reflect, lick our wounds and learn some valuable lessons from 2020.

One of your lawyers received an email congratulating them on their selection to yet another top list, award or ranking. They forward the email to you: “Is this legit? Should we pay for it?” (Sigh...) We feel your pain. That’s why we’ve developed a new checklist to help you quickly separate the wheat from the chaff. 

If one of your law firm’s marketing goals is to stay top of mind with prospects, then a public relations effort is critical. But what happens when there’s nothing going on worth pitching to the media? How can you earn media attention during those (inevitable) lulls in the practice of law, when big litigation victories or massive M&A deals aren’t happening? 

Putting aside politics, Trump flouts the standard rules of engagement with the media in a way no other U.S. president has done before. Sometimes his disregard for PR best practices works to his benefit. Other times, it doesn’t — in dramatic fashion. In a recent article for Law360, Michelle provides four lessons that lawyers can take from the president’s Axios interview to avoid a similar disastrous outcome. 

While getting extra mileage out of any piece of content is just good marketing, there are pitfalls to avoid — namely, getting sued for copyright infringement. 

There are many pros and cons to offering media exclusives. In our latest blog post, we walk you through how media exclusives work, potential pitfalls and what you should consider when using the strategy.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to change the way we live our lives and do business, more and more law firms are shifting budgets from events and in-person networking to activities that can be done remotely, including media relations. To be effective at media relations, however, you must understand the various roles in newsrooms, from editors to reporters, news directors and more.

Numerous law firms have joined a public conversation about race, justice and equality in the wake of the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and others. Other law firms are likely weighing whether to join the conversation, and if so, how to do it in a way that is authentic, substantive and helpful. 

We recently spoke to the managing partner of a six-attorney employment law firm. She said that before COVID-19, her firm received 100 calls a week, on average, from prospective clients. With the coronavirus pandemic, that number is now 20. If you or your lawyers are facing similar coronavirus-induced downtime, I provide six ideas for how to productively use that time in today’s blog post. 

A few weeks ago, Michelle was part of a panel discussion, hosted by three Florida Legal Marketing Association (LMA) groups: Orlando, Jacksonville and South Florida. If you couldn’t attend the virtual event, read the key takeaways including how law firms are evolving in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, where legal marketing budgets are going, what the media is saying and what legal marketers can do to get ahead. 

In every study we could find, from the 1920s onward, companies that maintained or increased their marketing budgets during economic downturns pulled ahead of their competitors in profits and market share.