1. Lack of focus. Many people fail to define their market. Determine who you are, what kind of work you want to do and who you want to represent. Then target your audience. You can’t be everything to everyone.

2. Cliché images. Cliché images such as the scales of justice, a gavel, a courthouse, law books are boring, and, well, cliché. How about a picture of yourself doing something outside of the office? People looking at your site already know you are a lawyer because you told them so. You don’t have to always look like a lawyer. Which leads to #3.

3. Fails to distinguish you. How are you different than the other lawyers with a web presence? Why should someone want to hire you? For example, if people Google “Minneapolis criminal lawyer,” they will get 226,000 results. Make sure you distinguish yourself.

4. Looks like an advertisement. You want prospective clients to know what you will do for them and how you can help them. You don’t want your site to just be a “sales pitch.” What’s more Appealing – hire me, hire me, hire me or if you hire me, this is what I will do for you?

5. Endless list of your accomplishments. Clients don’t care about how you did in law school, nor about your awards. Reading a list of your accomplishments sounds like “blah, blah, blah” to the prospective client. They want to know what you will do for them.

6. Too wordy. If your site is too wordy, people will navigate away. Attention span on a website is measured in seconds. Too much information, too many words or words in tiny type or font that are difficult to read are like the “blah, blah, blah” above.

7. Stale information. Many people forget to update their site and keep it fresh. Do you mention that your phone number will be changing on January 1, 2009? If your site is stale, prospective clients will wonder if you will stay on top of their file.

8. Weak content. This includes legal jargon, poorly written content, improper grammar and typos. What does your writing say about you? Do you seem approachable? Can you construct a proper sentence? Would someone really want to hire you based on your written content?

9. Poor navigation. Make your site people-friendly. Make navigation easy and logical. Does your site make sense? Have a non-lawyer friend take a look at it.

10. Too busy. Does your site look frenzied? Is there too much going on? If your site is too busy, will you be too busy for your client?

Your website is a window into who you are. Make sure the impression you give is the one you want people to have.

© Susan for Practice Blawg, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Marketing, Web Design, Web Sites

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Greg, being who he is and in the job he is in, added a twist, that is, that the 20% of the work time should concern technology projects of interest to each of us.

I will admit that my first reaction was an observation that Greg just gave birth to an oxymoron, at least as far as I was concerned. Don’t get me wrong, I use technology, but admit that I rarely find technology in and of itself interesting. There, I’ve gone public. (Actually I’ve confessed to similar feelings in a previous post.) To me, technology is a means to an end not an entertainment on its own.

Right behind the first reaction, was a second, somewhat snottier observation—that Greg and some of my other co-workers would feel no pain with this assignment, while the long-suffering me would struggle under the yoke of oppression. I explained to Greg that for him, the assignment was essentially “go forth and do more of what you love to do, excel at, and will do anyway” while for me, it was “go forth and spit and swear and struggle and at the end of the period, you’ll still be the tech-lite-est one on the team.”

At this point, you may be wondering how it is that I am still employed. I’d have to credit Greg’s thick-skinned-ness when it comes to my outbursts, which he refers to as necessary and productive “push back.” Also, to my credit, he knows that at the end of the day I tend to be an obedient soul, even enthusiastic, and so it was with the 20% project. I jumped in, kept jumping, swearing, asking questions, swearing, making mistakes, swearing, asking for help, swearing. And at the end of the six weeks, I was converted. Not to technology as my plaything, but to the concept that forcing oneself to travel new territory results in newfound knowledge, but more importantly, in newfound confidence.

I experimented with various presentation software like Prezi and Mac’s version of PowerPoint, learned about jpegs and pngs and such, and really dug into the admin side of WordPress. I also learned some intangible skills:

• Anything can be “Googled.” I knew this before but I previously assumed that no one would ever pose the dopey tech questions I have. Alas, dopes abound and more astonishing, there exists techies who answer without making dopes feel dopier. I not only found answers, I found that I understood them, even posed a few to the masses on the Internet machine.
• My questions are not always dopey. Even those who know how to do certain things, don’t necessarily know why. I tend to be a “Why” kind of gal, so I pushed others to learn a bit in order to answer my questions and not lose face.
• It would too much of a fairy tale ending to say I learned to like the struggle with things I am not naturally adept at. I will say, however, I enjoyed the AHA! feeling that came after the struggle, when I “got it.” In between curses, there were lots of those moments.
• I can make my kids proud. “You did that?”

I was unable to carve out 20% of my time to experiment, even taking a sabbatical from the blog and some other tasks. My workload couldn’t be shifted that much on such short notice. So, I worked more hours to enable the experimentation. It was worth it, both for me and for the MSBA. In my experimentation time, I came up with a couple of new ideas for practicelaw. For myself, I finished another 5k, this one virtual. (The first was a real one, in October. You may not be impressed but if you knew how little I like to sweat, how slowly I ran when I first started training, and how naturally clumsy I am, you’d be awed.)

Now that I’ve dragged you through my period of self-flagellation and revival, if you are still reading, you may wonder why I thought this an appropriate blog post. Think of it as a pass-it-forward post. Many attorneys have confessed to having more free time on their hands than they’d like and everyone has things they don’t know, dread doing. This post is my start as a motivational guru, with the hopes that if the encouragement is from a regular Joe, you might hear and embrace the idea of taking some time a couple of times a week to expand your horizons. Encourage your staff to do the same. Good luck. If you need some swear words to help you on the journey, contact me. I have a passel.

© Nancy Hupp for Practice Blawg, 2011. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Blogging, Technology

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What’s Wufoo? It’s a cloud-based application that allows you to build online forms and collect information with those forms. But it’s so much more than that:

• it integrates incredibly well with Freshbooks, MailChimp, SalesForce and a slew  of other business applications, making your practice more seamless and efficient. It also integrates with PayPal and other online payment systems in case you are selling some law-related materials (or potentially charging for limited scope services);
• it allows you to download data in various formats, including an Excel spreadsheet, which in turn allows you to do some fancy mail merging to get potential client data instantly into a letter or other legal form;
• it’s intuitive, easy, and fun to use (yeah, I said fun – and funny);
• it is encrypted for paid monthly accounts, which I recommend;
• it has an open API that you can use to do a lot more fancy integration stuff (ok, got a bit geeky there but those who know what I’m talking about will appreciate it);
• importantly, if implemented on your site, it gives a potential client what they need most at the moment: responsiveness and a plan of action, all without you lifting a finger.

Doubt what I’m saying or not sure how it works? Come to the next Off the Clock to find out. Better yet, try out a Wufoo-generated form by clicking on and completing my fictitious Estate Planning Request form, courtesy of my fictitious pal C. Hank Peters. Fill in as little information as you want, but at least provide a name and email address so you can see what happens when you submit your info. Or fill out the form below, as Wufoo supplies the code necessary to copy the form and paste it into your website.

I’ve introduced Wufoo to Andrea, our resident practitioner here, and she questions whether it is affordable for most newly minted attorneys. I agree that, at $29.95 a month, it’s a bit pricey. But if the aim is to get your law practice “on-a-stick” and more responsive to potential online clients, in my mind it’s worth every penny.

© Gregory Luce for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: MailChimp, Software, WuFoo

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I felt the same way when I asked a more tech-savvy coworker what “RSS” meant. “Really Simple Syndication.” Hmm. Given that it was so simple, how could I follow up with, “What the heck is it for?”

While I’ll admit that I would have been reluctant to tackle something termed “Exceptionally Complex Concept,” I was equally hesitant to explore RSS because all I could think was, “What if someone explains it and I don’t get it?”

Alas someone did explain it and I did get it so I will pass on the favor because I have a sneaking suspicion that there are still plenty of smart people who don’t know what RSS is or why they might want to utilize it.

The basic concept is that information on the Internet is vast and ever changing. RSS gives you a way to tame the beast:

• content comes to you versus you surfing around OR
• you tailor the content your receive, thus are not bombarded with all that is available

An awkward but perhaps useful illustration is the housing market. Let’s say you want to buy a house. You can drive around and look for “For Sale” signs, but the instant you think you’re done, other houses will have gone on the market. So, even if you like driving around, you never know when you’ve seen what is available at any given time. Furthermore, you can’t tell from the curb what’s inside. So, many people sit down with a realtor, specify what kind of house they’re interested in, and the realtor lets them know when something comes on the market that meets their specifications.

RSS is your realtor, except RSS doesn’t get paid a commission, it’s free. Like your realtor, you can tell RSS how you want to be notified of what’s available. You can say

• “Send me an email regarding each new addition.” OR
• “Put each new addition in ‘a reader’ as it becomes available, and I will go there when I have time.” (sort of like stacking things up on the corner of your desk)

Now you can read the email when it arrives or read it later. You can go through your inbox when you have time or you can pick up the whole stack and throw it out. The one thing you don’t have to do is go looking. You need only decide to read or delete. (Note: to avoid overwhelming your inbox, Microsoft Outlook maintains separate folders where RSS feeds go, or you can set up filters and rules in Outlook so your email feeds go wherever you want them.

So, RSS saves you time. Instead of  surfing around from website to website, you just go once and “subscribe” to a website’s RSS feed. Do that by clicking on the (typically) orange RSS icon then follow the instructions. Now, whenever that website has new content, it will come to you. And while you’re at it, subscribe to our Practice Blawg feed here.

If it is a website with various kinds of content, you can ask to be notified only when certain kinds of content are updated. In other words, you can “tailor your feed.” The New York Times is a good example: Click here. See? You can ask to receive any news updates, only sports updates or further tailor to just ones on college basketball.

So, to recap, you now realize you can stop running around the Web and let the part of the Web that interests you come directly to you. Or, as I mentioned earlier, come to your reader. In other words, instead of coming into your email inbox, you can have it stack up somewhere. That somewhere is a reader. Check out any of these popular free readers.

If you decide to go the reader route, set up the reader first, then tell the RSS to send info to the reader, not to your email inbox. Either way you are taming the vast, ever-changing information flow on the Web. You’ll get exactly what you want, you won’t miss new content postings, nor waste time surfing.

In closing, I hope you have found my explanation of RSS to be a really simple tour de force.

© Nancy Hupp for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Feed Readers, RSS

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First up, SpicyNodes.  It promises to make your site “spicy” by organizing your site and allowing users to “scan large quantities of information and linger over the details important to them.”  It’s basically an interactive mind map.  On a law firm website, I could see using this to organize practice areas, information about the firm, or as an overall site map.  It’s free for individuals but there’s a monthly fee for businesses, and it’s still in Beta.

For anyone with Q & A on their site, try this nifty little FAQ.  It makes your Frequently Asked Questions more interactive by clicking on the question to see the answer.  See it at work on our mndocs site, though installation on your own site may not be for the faint of heart if the terms CSS and jQuery make you squeamish or itchy. It’s a free download from CSS Tricks, a great site that provides a lot of web design tips and resources.

Lastly, try Wordle.  Have you ever admired a tag cloud on a blog?  Now you can have a word cloud for any website with RSS or other text you enter.  Here’s the one for Practice Blawg using the option to pull words from any site with RSS:

And here’s an example of the option to just enter plain text with words from the MSBA Goals.

Use word clouds on a page of your website (maybe about your practice areas or law firm philosophy), or on marketing materials.  You can customize it with font, number of words, text and background color choices, shape of the cloud, and direction of the words.  Tagul is another similar service.

© Andrea for Practice Blawg, 2010. | Permalink | No comments yet | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: CSS, FAQ, Web Design

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