Wrapping up an Attorney at Work week devoted to “This Business of Clients,” Edge International’s Gerry Riskin takes on the tough one: How to respond to the awkward, infuriating, soul-sucking questions you occasionally get from clients. You know the ones—sometimes they’re so astonishingly rude or silly you want to re-evaluate your career choice. No need for that! Gerry suggests some great ways to respond that can turn a challenge into a win-win.

Resist the Impulse to Parry and Thrust

In situations involving you and your client, the adversarial system is your worst enemy. The only win is a long-term client relationship that is sustainable, and a short-term victory gained by your legal swordsmanship almost guarantees a failure on that score. Although certain things clients say are sure to get your dander up, I respectfully suggest you put the sword away and try a response designed to maintain the relationship. Below are a five examples of conversations most likely to test your client relationship skills, along with possible responses. Of course, I offer these possibilities assuming you always offer unsurpassed quality; give solid value for your fee; and really care about your client and are prepared to provide excellent service. The options are meant to be catalysts to help you think through responses in your own natural style and language—these are not scripts.

1. Asking for the Retainer

When you ask for a retainer, your client might say something like: “Why am I being asked to pay in advance—don’t you trust me?”

Possible response: “Of course I trust you—if I didn’t, my firm would not represent you. Be assured that you are not paying in advance—in fact, you are paying as the work is being done. The retainer allows my firm to draw funds as they are used. As long as you remain in step with what we’ve requested, I can assure you it will be fair to both of us. Would it be more convenient to provide the $5,000 today, or would you prefer to provide $2,500 today and $2,500 more by a week Friday?”

Be aware that your client may say: “I am short of funds right now.” In this case, the possible response is: “Let’s establish a pace for your file that your resources allow.”  Where this is not practical, you might use an alternate response, such as: “Our law firm is not equipped to lend you money for your legal work, but we can certainly help you explore options to borrow what you need.”

2. Delegating Work to Someone Else

When delegating to another lawyer in your firm, your client might say something like: “I don’t want anyone else working on my files.”

Possible response: “Why?” (Wait for answer, and get the real reason if you can. Typically, your clients will be afraid that you will not be personally involved and that they will lose your caring concern … or that someone else may not have your intelligence and skill. By finding out the real reasons, your response can address them specifically.) Then you might say: “I can assure you that I will take personal responsibility for your satisfaction. I will know how this matter is unfolding at all times and will step in if I think it is necessary. You are welcome to contact me at any time if you have any concerns.”

3. Proposing Additional Work

When proposing  work your client needs (let’s say drafting a policy manual or doing some risk prevention training), your client might say something like: “Our people can ill afford the time that would be required.”

Possible response: “If you still feel that way once we make our initial report, then let’s leave it there.  We will only move beyond that point if you decide some aspect of this is a priority for you—is that fair?”

4. The Bill is Greater Than Expected

When fees exceed the estimate, your client might say something like: “I’m a good client, surely I deserve a break.”

Possible response: “You deserve the very best our firm has to offer and rest assured we will always ensure you get it. As I mentioned, I have gone over the file with a fine-tooth comb and eliminated any time where the value to you might have been questionable. I have also determined that the reason we exceeded the original estimate is based on circumstances that neither you nor we could have anticipated. Finally, we brought this to your attention the moment it came to ours. I can tell you that our proposed invoice is fair and represents strong value for you. If you disagree, it is important for me to understand why, so I can either explain it or compromise if necessary in order to ensure that you are completely satisfied.”

5. A Complaining Client

When delivering a complaint, your client might say something like: “I’m very unsatisfied and frustrated….”

Possible response: “Tell me about it—in full, if you would, please.” (Do not react until you have it all. Ask as many questions as it takes. Often it’s not so much about the specific solution as much as how you reach it. By demonstrating that you are a great listener and you care deeply, you will be the beneficiary of reduced tension, stress and anxiety on the part of your client. And they will be much more receptive to exploring reasonable solutions.)

Then you can say: “I’m glad you took the time to fully explain this to me. I have a couple of thoughts about how we might make this right for you, but before I tell you what I have in mind, did you have any thoughts on a solution?” (If your client has no such ideas, proceed. But if your client does have an idea, you will be much more successful if you can weave that idea into a jointly conceived solution.)

Gerry Riskin is a founding partner of global consultancy Edge International. He is a former managing partner of an international law firm,  is a Fellow of The College of Law in London and a visiting Professor at the University of Pretoria. Gerry is the author of  The Successful Lawyer and he co-authored Practice Development: Creating the Marketing Mindset, Herding Cats and Beyond Knowing. He blogs at Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices.

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In situations involving you and your client, the adversarial system is your worst enemy. The only win is a long-term client relationship that is sustainable, and a short-term victory gained by your legal swordsmanship almost guarantees a failure on that score. Although certain things clients say are sure to get your dander up, I respectfully suggest you put the sword away and try a response designed to maintain the relationship.

Resist the Impulse to Parry and Thrust

Below are five examples of conversations most likely to test your client relationship skills, along with possible responses. Of course, I offer these possibilities assuming you always offer unsurpassed quality, give solid value for your fee, really care about your client and are prepared to provide excellent service. The options are meant to be catalysts to help you think through responses in your own natural style and language — these are not scripts.

1. Asking for the retainer. When you ask for a retainer, your client might say something like: “Why am I being asked to pay in advance—don’t you trust me?”

Possible response: “Of course, I trust you — if I didn’t, my firm would not represent you. Be assured that you are not paying in advance — in fact, you are paying as the work is being done. The retainer allows my firm to draw funds as they are used. As long as you remain in step with what we’ve requested, I can assure you it will be fair to both of us. Would it be more convenient to provide the $5,000 today, or would you prefer to provide $2,500 today and $2,500 more by a week Friday?”

Be aware that your client may say: “I am short of funds right now.” In this case, the possible response is: “Let’s establish a pace for your file that your resources allow.”  Where this is not practical, you might use an alternate response, such as: “Our law firm is not equipped to lend you money for your legal work, but we can certainly help you explore options to borrow what you need.”

2. Delegating work to someone else. When delegating to another lawyer in your firm, your client might say something like: “I don’t want anyone else working on my files.”

Possible response: “Why?” (Wait for answer, and get the real reason if you can. Typically, your clients will be afraid that you will not be personally involved and that they will lose your caring concern … or that someone else may not have your intelligence and skill. By finding out the real reasons, your response can address them specifically.) Then you might say: “I can assure you that I will take personal responsibility for your satisfaction. I will know how this matter is unfolding at all times and will step in if I think it is necessary. You are welcome to contact me at any time if you have any concerns.”

3. Proposing additional work. When proposing work your client needs (let’s say drafting a policy manual or doing some risk prevention training), your client might say something like: “Our people can ill afford the time that would be required.”

Possible response: “If you still feel that way once we make our initial report, then let’s leave it there.  We will only move beyond that point if you decide some aspect of this is a priority for you — is that fair?”

4. The bill is greater than expected. When fees exceed the estimate, your client might say something like: “I’m a good client, surely I deserve a break.”

Possible response: “You deserve the very best our firm has to offer and rest assured we will always ensure you get it. As I mentioned, I have gone over the file with a fine-tooth comb and eliminated any time where the value to you might have been questionable. I have also determined that the reason we exceeded the original estimate is based on circumstances that neither you nor we could have anticipated. Finally, we brought this to your attention the moment it came to ours. I can tell you that our proposed invoice is fair and represents strong value for you. If you disagree, it is important for me to understand why so I can either explain it or compromise if necessary in order to ensure that you are completely satisfied.”

5. A complaining client. When delivering a complaint, your client might say something like: “I’m very unsatisfied and frustrated….”

Possible response: “Tell me about it — in full, if you would, please.” (Do not react until you have it all. Ask as many questions as it takes. Often it’s not so much about the specific solution as much as how you reach it. By demonstrating that you are a great listener and you care deeply, you will be the beneficiary of reduced tension, stress and anxiety on the part of your client. And they will be much more receptive to exploring reasonable solutions.)

Then you can say: “I’m glad you took the time to fully explain this to me. I have a couple of thoughts about how we might make this right for you, but before I tell you what I have in mind, did you have any thoughts on a solution?” (If your client has no such ideas, proceed. But if your client does have an idea, you will be much more successful if you can weave that idea into a jointly conceived solution.)

Gerry Riskin is a founding partner of Edge International. He is a former managing partner of an international law firm, a Fellow of both The College of Law in London and the College of Law Practice Management. Gerry is a popular facilitator, teacher and retreat speaker and a widely recognized expert on managing professional service firms. He blogs at Amazing Firms, Amazing Practices. Follow him @riskin.

This Attorney at Work “Classic” originally appeared in June 2012.

Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com

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You can track nearly everything related to fitness with an app or wearable, or some smart combination of the two: sleep, steps, heart rate, calories, nutrition … the list goes on. But do you really need to track your fitness? The answer is yes.

If You Want to Improve Your Fitness, Track It

Studies show that one of the best ways to make improvements is to first know where you stand, giving you a clear picture of how healthy and active you are, or aren’t, and where you can make improvements. Keeping track of your progress will provide accountability to yourself — and an instant “pat on the back” when you meet your goals. (Or, in my case, an instant “vibration on the wrist” from my Fitbit when I reach 10,000 steps in a day.)

So What Should You Track?

Below are the top five fitness metrics to track. The first three apply to everyone because they are important no matter your fitness goals — whether you want to get active or stay active, or be healthy, or lose weight, or gain muscle. The last two are specialized, depending on your specific goals and needs.

1. Sleep. I’ve said it before, sleep is the foundation of health. According to Russell Foster, a circadian neuroscientist at Oxford University, the quantity of your time asleep affects the quality of your time awake. For the longest time, I thought something was wrong with me because I always felt so tired during the day. Then I started using my Fitbit to track my sleep. I realized that even when I was in bed for eight hours, I wasn’t getting a full eight hours of sleep. When I first started tracking my sleep, I was getting about six hours each night, on average. Now that I’m tracking it regularly, I make a conscious effort to avoid shortchanging myself on sleep too many nights in a row. I don’t always achieve my eight-hour goal, but when I feel exhausted at the end of the week, I can see how much sleep I didn’t get. And I can try to do better the following week.

2. Heart rate. No matter your fitness goals, everyone needs to be heart-healthy. A wearable that tracks your heart rate enables you to determine the intensity level of your exercise, whether it is walking, running, yoga, whatever. Ideally, to be heart-healthy, you need 30 minutes of activity at 60 to 80 percent of your maximum heart rate at least three times per week. (Five times a week is better!) You can most accurately determine your maximum heart rate with a stress test, but if you are generally healthy with no heart issues, you can estimate your maximum heart rate by subtracting your age from 220. If you are 40 years old, your maximum heart rate would be 180. So, three to five times per week, for half an hour, you want to engage in an activity where your heart rate stays between 108 and 144 beats per minute.

3. Activity level. Different apps and trackers measure this differently. It can be tracking the number of steps you take in a day or reminding you to get up and move periodically if you are too sedentary. About 80 million Americans are considered sedentary, which means they average about 2,000 steps per day. Using a fitness tracker can help you see where you stand (or sit). Getting at least 10,000 steps each day — which is the equivalent of almost five miles — is the recommended minimum activity.

4. Your preferred fitness activity. Depending on your preferred fitness activity, a wearable may be helpful. For example, if you are a runner, you may want a tracker with GPS, such as the Apple Watch or Garmin Forerunner, which can log your runs, distance, time and pace. If you prefer guided workouts and exercise routines, there are limitless apps that can help you. For example, Runtastic Results provides over 100 workouts that use your own body weight so that you don’t need a gym or special equipment. There are hundreds more apps — among my favorites are Daily Workouts and Pocket Yoga — as well as numerous YouTube fitness channels. (I like BeFit.)

5. Calories or nutrition. You may want to track your calories and nutrition, for at least two weeks, to understand how your eating habits are helping or hindering you. MyFitnessPal has been around for a while, but it’s still one of the best apps out there for tracking not only calories, but also nutrition. And it links to some fitness trackers like Fitbit so your allotted calorie intake automatically adjusts based on your tracked activity.

We all have a tendency to overestimate the amount of activity we do and underestimate the calories that we eat. So get tracking, and get on track to meeting your health goals!

Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com

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Let’s say you just found out you have a rare illness. Suddenly, you are in the market for a specialty physician. You do some research, get some names and make an appointment with one or two doctors. What kind of conversation would you have? My guess is you would ask questions like: “Have you treated this illness before? How many times? What kinds of protocols or treatments have you used? What have been the outcomes? What can I expect?”

Well, for a lawyer, your clients and prospects are no different. If you’re a real estate attorney, a client may want to know how many shopping center leases you have handled. If you get a call from a client looking to buy a bank branch, she may want to know how long these acquisitions usually take. If you’re an employment litigator, a prospect may want to know how FMLA cases usually turn out.

Facts are powerful marketing tools. While I often suggest keeping track of your work, I should emphasize it even more.

Capturing History: Track Your Practice Information

The format you use to track your experience can be a simple spreadsheet or chart. Depending on your practice, you might capture:

• Description of the matter. Each practice will be different in terms of the categories. In IP litigation, for example, you might track patent, trademark, trade secrets, etc.
• Client (name of the party you represented). You may want to get a reference in the future or pull the file to refresh your memory.
• Value/size of the matter. Depending on the area, it could be the sale price, the number of parties involved or the money that was on the line.
• Dates. You may want to track both start and end dates so you can better assess how long matters take, like a certain kind of regulatory approval.
• Industry. How many non-competes have you handled in the health-care, brokerage or technology industries?
• Resolution. You should track how the matter turned out. In litigation, was it settled? Dismissed on summary judgment? Won on appeal?
• Fees. You’ll want to keep track of what clients paid for each matter.
• Source of business. If you can, you should also indicate where the client came from.

Using the Information in Your Marketing Efforts

There are myriad ways to use this information for marketing purposes. You can analyze the typical duration of matters, calculate the approximate costs, aggregate the number of matters and develop rules of thumb. For example, you might:

• Promote that you closed X deals with a value of more than $X in the past five years.
• Advise clients how long a particular type of financing typically takes to close.
• Let clients know that similar real estate matters have cost in the range of $X to $Y per square foot.
• Note how many divorces you have handled for airline pilots.
• Calculate that you’ve done X deals in the agricultural industry or have represented X of the top 50 construction companies.
• Identify the best referral sources for the best kinds of clients, cases or matters.
• Promote your experience for a substantive “College” application (e.g., ACTEC).

Whether you are using these facts for your website bio, in a proposal or in pitch meetings, your message will be much more compelling. Of course, from an ethical standpoint, you cannot make promises nor do you want to create expectations for a certain outcome on the part of clients. But think about how a client’s confidence in you will increase if you can talk about your experience and their substantive matters based on history.

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Recently I read an article on content marketing that promised, in so many words, “how to market yourself without extra work.” It then presented an app, showing “how easy it is to automate repurposing your content.”

“Once you have your original material — article, webinar, etc. — repurposing doesn’t require much more work, just some creative thinking.” Uh, no. It’s not that simple. This is akin to saying, “Cold fusion isn’t hard. You just need a few hydrogen atoms.”

Repurposing content is one of the most important things you can do to market your practice — so you need to know how to do it right.

Audiences Vary

Each piece of content you have was originally designed for a unique medium and audience. As such, the tone will vary and the content will need to be adjusted for each application. And audiences vary widely.

For example, let’s take an article you’ve written on the latest trends in social enterprise corporations. California has two corporate structures specifically designed for social enterprises, the Benefit Corporation and the Social Purpose Corporation. Each has its own advantages. As they are relatively new, they are a great topic to exploit.

Say you start with a piece written by one of your firm’s lawyers for your local legal newspaper. This paper will have its own writers’ guidelines and editing policies. More importantly, it will also have a specific tone, and you will want to emulate that.

Done. Great. Now comes the work.

Pushing Out Content

Next, you offer the article as a contributor piece to the local business journal. They accept. Do you simply revise the article to adhere to their word count? Absolutely not. You are speaking to a business audience, not a legal one, and you’ll want to adjust your language accordingly. No jargon or multiple clauses. And put the corporate change in a broader business context. Share what the new structure is designed to do, who is using it, and what advantages have been gained so far.

Great. Can we just slap those pieces on the next client alert? No!

Client alerts are shorter and are designed for busy lawyers and clients on the go who may only have time to scan the headlines and subheads. Take that first piece and cut it in half. But link to more expansive materials for those who need more information. This means creating a white paper. (Don’t worry, you can reuse it by linking to it from multiple platforms.)

Now you have steam, and everyone wants to do an hour-long breakfast CLE program to show off the new content. This means detailed slides and course materials that drill deep into each corporate structure. You can start with the white paper, but you’ll need to revise it to make the tone a bit less formal.

Resist Autopilot

Can you spin the CLE program into a webinar? Nope. No one is going to sit through an audio-and-slides presentation for an hour. Take the CLE program and cut it in half. This is likely going to mean cutting slides and replacing others to package the content into 30 minutes.

Can we take the webinar and make it a podcast? Not without work. Ideally, podcasts are 15 minutes long, perfect for a client on their commute, but not so much that it wears them out. And you’ll want a more conversational tone to help the listener along, especially as they won’t have slides to back up the information.

Can we just video the podcast and put that on YouTube, or film the CLE and slap it up? I wouldn’t advise it. The Twitterization of our attention spans means the ideal video is two to five minutes long. No one suffers through an hour-long video if they aren’t getting CLE credit for it. And you don’t want just a talking head. Intersperse shots of your presenter with slides and voice-over narrative. Keep the tone conversational and the material easy to digest.

I Think You Get It by Now

Repurposing is one of the most important marketing things you can do. But don’t do it with a cookie cutter. Do it with all the sophistication you can muster, and you’ll own the topic in a way no one else will.

More on this: Read “Five Ways to Make Speaking Pay Off” by Merrilyn Astin Tarlton

Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com

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This past month, newspapers around the world have been filled with stories of the Panama Papers — a massive trove of confidential tax planning information that will probably topple more than one politician. For lawyers and law firms, the chilling fact is that these millions of documents emanated from the computer files of a global law firm — Mossack Fonseca. Their client records and all of their secret dealings are now being read by journalists around the world.

Was it done by some skilled cybersleuth, intent on exposing illegal or improper activity, or at least hypocrisy? Was it a disgruntled internal whistleblower, within the law firm? Either way, it points to the vulnerability of law firms, and to the seriousness of the stakes when confidential client information is leaked.

What’s in Your Cybersecurity Bag of Tricks?

A month ago, we asked the Attorney At Work community to let us know how confident you are about cybersecurity in your firm. Today, we unveil the results. (Download highlights here.)

Bottom line: Results from the Attorney at Work Cybersecurity Survey show clearly the vulnerability of law firms. None of us, however small or large, can afford to be complacent.

How Do You Sleep?

We started by asking what keeps you up at night. Topping the list was worry about sensitive client information and personally identifiable information being stolen. Credentials and identities being stolen pulled up third.

Lawyers are notoriously sloppy about passwords, and one does not have to be a star pupil in a cyber-hacking graduating class to break through our security. Generally, law firm computers are much easier to attack than government or business computers.

Is your insurance adequate? When asked if their firm had cyber-insurance covering data breaches, only 22 percent said yes, while 47 percent said their insurance didn’t cover cyber issues. 

A recent UK government survey suggested that everyone overestimates their insurance. In that survey, 52 percent of CEOs were confident they had cyber coverage, but according to the insurance industry, take-up was less than 2 percent — rose-colored glasses in the executive suite?

Do you encrypt flash drives? Given the huge capacity of flash USB drives and other mobile devices, we were surprised that only 27 percent of those surveyed routinely encrypt them.

Do you know how to encrypt email? We were surprised that 56 percent of those surveyed said they knew how to encrypt an email. In a similar Australian survey, most firms provided encryption services for lawyers, but very few actually knew how to use them.

Can you stop insiders? Most respondents — 58 percent — were confident they have adequate systems to deal with insider threats. We were surprised at this level of confidence, given the stories in legal publications about staff members taking advantage of weak firm security. Perhaps our readers know something that the Am Law100 firms don’t?

Are you confident? Twenty percent responded that they were “very” confident about their firm’s ability to manage cybersecurity. When you add in those who were “somewhat” confident you end up with a colossal 91 percent who said they were okay. Almost as many were confident that management appreciated cybersecurity risks and the firm’s vulnerabilities.

Are clients bugging you about security? While a significant number (39 percent) said that clients were asking about cybersecurity, that left a majority reporting no client pressure on the issue.

So if data breaches happen, what are you going to do about them? Only one in three of those surveyed — 34 percent — had a crisis management plan in place to deal with data security breaches. Another quarter reported planning to do so in 2016.

The Panama Papers may encourage a few more firms to actually put this on their priority action list.

You can download the one-page highlights report here.

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Question: Are there tools available to help me see how many people are reading my legal blog? Are there standards to judge its success?

Lindsay Griffiths: What will be most important to you in gauging your blog’s level of success is how engaged your audience is, and this is a difficult thing to measure.

In terms of measurement, either your blog host should be able to provide you with tracking statistics, or you can use Google Analytics. It is an excellent tool to give you a look at the data that you need to see how people are interacting with your content. The number of clicks that you get on any post is a measure of your “reach” — basically, how many eyeballs are seeing your posts. You can look at the “time spent” on your blog, but that can be misleading. We’ve all navigated to a website, only to be distracted by a call or an email coming in, and left the browser window open — instances like that will artificially inflate those numbers.

So the best metric, as per the Content Marketing Institute, is what they call “scroll depth.” This tells you how far down a page a reader has scrolled — if they scrolled all the way to the bottom, they presumably read your content all the way through. Google Analytics doesn’t measure this, but WordPress does offer a free plugin that will tie in with your analytics.

You can also take into account how often your blog posts are shared, but there is quite a lot of data to suggest that there is actually little correlation between what people read and what they share.

Ultimately, you’ll also need to tie those numbers in with other data, depending on the goals you’ve set. For example, if you’d like to be known as a thought leader, and being quoted in certain niche magazines and asked to speak at conferences is your goal, then connecting with people who can make that happen and getting those placements/opportunities will be a reflection of your success.

Other goals can be harder to track because the data is more subjective, but you can use a combination of metrics to review your content, see what’s working and what isn’t, and refine your strategy to continue in pursuit of your goals.  

Lindsay Griffiths (@LindsayGriffith) is the director of relationship management at International Lawyers Network with experience in branding and identity development, as well as supporting an international legal network of more than 90 firms. She is also the co-chair of the Legal Marketing Association’s Technology Committee. 

Jabez LeBret: We use the standby: Google Analytics. You can track all the important metrics there. These include time on page, bounce rate, exit page, unique traffic versus returning traffic, and traffic source. You should note that “bounce rate” is now counted as any time a user visits only one page on your website.

The more challenging issue is figuring out what the data is telling you. For blogs, you should expect a higher bounce rate because many users will search for the answer to a legal question on Google, find your blog post, then leave after receiving the information they need. What you are looking for is a steady increase in traffic over time and for the time on page to be as long as it takes to read the blog post. If your post has a time on page of 1:32 and it takes 3:40 to read your post, you have a content problem.

Jabez LeBret (@jabezlebret) is a business writer for Forbes CMO Network, author of a No. 1 best-selling Amazon book on technology and marketing for lawyers, founding partner of a tech company for the legal profession, advisor to SUBWAY, a board member of the San Francisco Entrepreneurs’ Organization, co-chair of the LMA’s annual Your Honor Awards, and a keynote speaker on managing millennials.

Marketing Question?

No, not every lawyer has a professional marketer or business development coach on hand to answer questions. So send us your questions via email or in the comment section below, and we’ll pass them on to the experts at the Legal Marketing Association.

The Legal Marketing Association provides professional support and education as well as opportunities for intellectual and practical information exchange.

That serene screen-saver isn’t fooling anyone. Just one swipe reveals the clutter and chaos that lurks beneath: a winter’s worth of past projects, lists, sticky notes and alerts. Maybe you’re due for a little spring makeover? For this Friday Five+ installment, we asked our practice management dream team for their best tips on tidying up.

It doesn’t always require a software overhaul or a shiny new device to freshen your outlook. Small, simple measures can make a big difference in clearing up irritants that slow you down and stress you out.

Reid Trautz: Stress-Reducing Adjustments

It’s spring, so give your office a stress-reducing makeover with these kinds of changes:

• Poor lighting, especially fluorescent ceiling fixtures, can cause eyestrain and contribute to fatigue. Add warm task lighting to desks and reduce the glare on your computer monitors from those ceiling lights.
• Another source of stress is tension and pain caused by bad chairs with poor back support. Invest in properly fitted chairs.
• An improperly positioned monitor and keyboard can strain neck, eyes and hands, so look for office ergonomic articles online and make the recommended furniture adjustments.
• Noisy offices can inhibit concentration and add to stress and frustration. What furniture configurations or office policies can you make to reduce distractions?
• Finally, consider adding a water-cooler in the office to promote increased water consumption and better health.

Making any or all of these changes can result in a happier, healthier and more productive staff. 

Reid F. Trautz (@RTrautz) is Director of the Practice & Professionalism Center of the American Immigration Lawyers Association and a blogger on the issues of business process improvement, technology, legal ethics and effective practice management. Reid is co-author of the ABA’s “The Busy Lawyer’s Guide to Success: Essential Tips to Power Your Practice” and a past ABA TECHSHOW chair.

Nora Regis: A Wunderlist Way to Manage Email

Often, when I want to write some email, I am not in a place where I can sit and give it proper attention. I’ll be on my morning commute and suddenly think of an email I need to send, for example. Wunderlist, the to-do list manager, helps me catch these fleeting thoughts. And now I’ve created a whole email management system around it.

First, I created a to-do list called “Email.” If a thought strikes me, I enter the recipient’s name and the subject as an item in this list. Then I set aside a half-hour during the day to run through the list and fire off all the emails at once.

Wunderlist also has an add-on with Outlook that allows me to create a to-do based on any email. If I receive an email I can’t respond to that minute (and isn’t urgent), I click the “To-Do from Email” button in the Wunderlist Group on my Home tab in Outlook. The tool then automatically generates an item on my Email to-do list, and I can recall I need to respond to said message during my allotted email time.

Now I’m in control of my email, instead of it controlling me!

Nora Regis (@NoraRegisCBA) is Trainer & Coordinator, Law Practice Management & Technology, for the Chicago Bar Association. Nora is a former paralegal, specializing in litigation and bankruptcy. Prior to working in legal, she was a technology help desk agent at University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Heidi Alexander: Don’t Type It More Than Once

Here in New England, springtime means it’s finally time to get outdoors and enjoy some much-needed sun. Of course, to do so, you’ll need to create more time. No, you won’t need Stephen Hawking for this. Indeed, you can probably make this happen with software that you already own.

Every time you type a phrase or clause more than once, save it. Then, drop it into a program such as Microsoft Quick Parts (Word and Outlook) (see this handy video), and each time you need to use that phrase or clause, just click a button and Microsoft drops it in wherever you select. If you want to get a little fancier, try out a simple product like TextExpander (for Mac); Windows companion products include PhraseExpress, Breevy and ActiveWords, which allows you to create keyboard shortcuts for frequently used text and images. For example, you could use the program to create a shortcut for your firm’s address, pleading caption, response to a potential client, contract language, and even labeling files in a consistent manner. Here’s how attorney David Sparks does it with TextExpander.

If you’re not sure, try out TextExpander and use its “Statistics” to find out just how much time you have saved as a result of using the product!

Heidi S. Alexander (@heidialexander) is a law practice management advisor at the Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program (MassLOMAP), where she advises lawyers on practice management matters and in implementing new technologies. She is author of the new ABA book “Evernote as a Practice Tool.”

Sharon Nelson: Dump Unsupported Software!

NOT dumping unsupported software is one of the greatest cybersecurity risks your law office can have. Once software is unsupported, it is no longer receiving security updates. This was one of the many factors in the recent Panama Papers law firm breach. Many states have adopted the American Bar Association’s new language (or some variant) for Model Rules 1.1 (Competence) and 1.6 (Confidentiality). Even those that have not will tell you that competence with technology is implicit in Rule 1.1.

Yet lawyers continue to use programs that have gone out of support, notoriously Windows XP. Other out-of-support software includes Server 2003, Office 2003, Internet Explorer versions 10 and below and Apple’s QuickTime for Windows. Office 2007 will go out of support in October 2017 — you should probably plan to move to Office 2016/Office 365. The point is — you should make a list of all software you use and verify that it is still being supported. If it is not, upgrade.  “But it still works …” or “I’m afraid of the learning curve of new software” are not acceptable excuses.

Your ethical duties include keeping your data confidential. You must take “reasonable” steps to protect that data — and this sure as heck is one those steps. Use of unsupported software is an engraved invitation to hackers and a per se ethics violation.

Sharon D. Nelson (@SharonNelsonEsq) is President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc., a digital forensics, legal technology and information security firm. She has written or co-authored a number of books, including “The 2008-2015 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guides” and “Encryption Made Simple for Lawyers.” She blogs at Ride the Lightning and co-produces the podcast The Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology.

Deborah Savadra: Declutter Your Inbox via Outlook

A big part of email inbox management is keeping it decluttered. Easier said that done, I know, but here’s a thought: does that email that landed in your inbox need to stay an email? If someone’s asking you for something, turn it into a task. If it’s a deadline or other date you need to remember, move it to your calendar. Only leave things in your inbox that still need initial attention.

In Microsoft Outlook, this is a one-click operation. Simply drag the email over to your Tasks or Calendar area. In version 2010, it’ll be listed in a stack in the lower left-hand quadrant of your screen; in versions 2013 and above, look along the bottom of the screen for either icons or the folder labels “Tasks” or “Calendar.” Either way, you’ll get a pop-up menu that will let you either embed the text of the email into a new Task or Calendar item or attach the email to it (handy for emails with attachments). Once you’ve transformed that email, you can pull the original out of your inbox, knowing the information it contained is safely stored in a more appropriate form elsewhere.

Deborah Savadra (@legalofficeguru) is editor and chief blogger at Legal Office Guru, which specializes in helping legal professionals learn Microsoft Office features like Flagging Outlook Emails for follow-up and Using Outlook Rules & Alerts. Follow her on Twitter @legalofficeguru.

Dustin Cole: Don’t Spend More Money to Gain a Tech Advantage

Start with whatever software you have — whether that’s Clio, MyCase, Firm Central, Time Matters, or even Microsoft Outlook and Office — and learn to use it better. Most people use 25 percent or less of their software’s capabilities. So go online and learn what more you can do with it. Need to clean up your marketing contacts and referral sources? Outlook can be a decent contact manager. Need to handle initial inquiry calls better? Customize your Clio contact screen to facilitate call handling. Have trouble staying organized? Learn to use the task list capabilities of Outlook or your case management software.

Better tech doesn’t always need to be the latest software gadget. It can be as close as your old familiar programs.

Dustin Cole is a business and marketing advisor for law firms with nearly 25 years of practical experience helping lawyers build better, more profitable and more satisfying businesses. He has presented practice management, marketing and risk management CLE programs for more than 70 bar associations, as well as hundreds of firms.

Email marketing should be part of your internet marketing plan. (See “The Big Three Internet Marketing Activities for Lawyers.”) Emailing new posts from your blog to a list of clients and prospects increases the return on your blogging time (and maybe money) investment. The best e-newsletter or blog does nothing for you if it doesn’t get read.

Lure Them in With Great Headlines

You’ve probably heard the term “clickbait.” That’s a snippet of information that makes you want to know more. It’s no secret that every e-newsletter you publish should have its own headline. Yet, my in-box is filled with messages from lawyers that might be better termed “delete-bait.”  Here’s a sample:

• New Posts From the [sender’s name] Blog
• [Area of practice] News
• New Post on [blog name]
• News from [sender’s organization]
• The [sender’s organization] Newsletter Is Out

While it’s true that “new” is one of those words that lures people, these titles are sleep-inducing. They tell me nothing about the content, and they sure don’t make me want to click through. Too often the content turns out to be “me-formation:” I went here, I went there, I had a great time at the convention/conference/meeting.

Re-read your old posts. Did you create a custom headline for each one? Show your blog or newsletter posts to the most honest person you know — maybe your spouse? Does the headline make the reader want to read more or to yawn?

Make Good On the Promise Once They Click Through

Email is one thing, but if you are posting a tease on LinkedIn to get people to read a blog post on your website, you’re asking for a minimum of three clicks to get to the content. The payoff darn well better be worth it.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” People are busy. If you have wasted their time once, it will take a lot of work to get back those readers, those potential clients and referral sources. You’ve probably identified certain members of your LinkedIn groups who post regularly but don’t provide any valuable content, and you automatically delete those messages. You don’t want to be in that group. If you consistently provide valuable content in the body of your post, an attractive headline can keep people coming back to learn from your expertise.

Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com

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Information sitting in your law firm’s case management software can help you make better-informed marketing decisions — including where and when to advertise. Most firms have the information they need. It’s just a matter of making a priority of getting at it, and actually following through. Here are three steps you can take to fine-tune your marketing with a little basic data.

1. Mine the Gold in Your Data

Two of the most basic and useful pieces of information your case management software will contain are:

• Dates cases were opened
• Client ZIP codes

If you don’t have the time or inclination to ferret these out, talk to your case management vendor or reseller. For one client — a midsize full-service law firm — a reseller exported data for the previous two years to an Excel file. From there, two things were charted:

• Average cases by month
• ZIP codes by county

2. Knowing When to Advertise: Peak Seasons

After charting the data from the firm’s case management system, we learned they have three two-month peak seasons. One of those is June to July — but the prevailing wisdom during marketing meetings had been that the summer was slow!

Surprise, surprise.

A simple bar chart will show your peak months.

More efficient decisions. This firm uses cable TV in its advertising mix. Their media buys had always been about the same — each year their spending was pretty much equally distributed month to month. Now, the TV schedule is based on facts. For example, the frequency of ads begins to build one week prior to the start of a two-month peak period. It reaches a crescendo, then tapers off toward the end of that two-month period.

Other media helped by peak season data. Paid search — Google AdWords, Bing ads, pay-per-click (PPC) — can be scheduled based on peak season data, too. Print advertising is another obvious candidate, as are content marketing plans and social media campaigns.

3. ZIP Code Analysis Can Reveal Little-Known Facts

ZIP codes can be tallied and visualized either in list form or using a heat map.

A ZIP code heat map can reveal opportunities for growth.

An example of the usefulness: One law firm had always believed that its second-greatest percentage of clients came from the county north of its home base. Not so. The data revealed that the second-largest group of clients came from the south. This influenced a number of advertising decisions, including:

• Choosing which magazines to include in the publication ad space buy
• Fine-tuning of geographic settings for PPC and remarketing campaigns
• Choosing which cable TV zones to include in the TV buy
• Targeting which towns to use for locally optimized web pages for local search purposes (for example, a web page with the key phrase “bankruptcy lawyer Charleston”).

Bigger Issue: Where Will Growth Come From?

An even larger issue spurred by this ZIP code reporting had to do with future growth. Did the firm wish growth to come from the north or south or both? The counties to its north are more heavily populated, media is more expensive and there is more competition. To the south lie less populated counties with greater population growth potential. In addition, there are fewer competitors and the media costs are less.

What to do?

Date and ZIP code information is easy to get and worth its weight in gold. As with all small and midsize businesses, law firms are constantly being hounded by advertising entities to spend, spend, spend. Simple Excel charts showing case dates and client ZIP codes can help you determine when and where to invest.

More Information on Attorney at Work:

• Winning at Local Search by Mike Ramsey
• Social Media Marketing Trends for 2016 by Gyi Tsakalakis
• Six Hot Search Trends for 2016 by Mike Ramsey
• How to Make Your Social Media NOT Suck by Jabez Lebret
• Tools and Tricks to Automate Your Marketing

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There’s always someone in the crowd who insists “this meeting is a waste of time and money!” And another who puts pen to paper to add up hourly rates before pronouncing just how much money is actually being wasted (never considering how much money is wasted by that silly exercise).

It’s true, a lot of good time and money are wasted by meetings that pretend actual work is being done when, of course, no such thing occurs. On the other hand, in certain circumstances, a good face-to-face meeting can resolve a lot of miscommunication and quickly set up your group to make things happen in a way no multi-player email circus ever will.

Bar the Door, Katie!

Once you’ve had a good meeting — one with a simple agenda, effective information sharing, good outcomes, hard decisions — you want to ensure you don’t lose ground. Here are three key things you must do before anyone opens the door to leave.

1. Review key decisions. Too often, participants in a decision can walk away like the blind men and the elephant, with their own unique understandings of which way the decision went. It’s easy to avoid speaking the hard truth about what has been decided out of fear that some people in the room will re-open the wound upon realizing they just lost the game. Too bad. You can deal with them now or you can deal with them later — when it’s worse.

Just walk down the list of agenda items, briefly describing the decision in each case.

• Cybersecurity insurance: We’ve selected proposal three.
• Law school capital fund: We’ll donate $5,000 this month and $3,000 in June.
• Contingency fees: All future clients must first be evaluated by Rosemary.
• Firm retreat: Not until fall.

2. Identify action items and clarify assignments. Some of those decisions, as well as other things discussed, will have resulted in specific actions to be taken. Don’t leave room for those assignments to be foggy — review them and make certain the people assigned understand and have what they need before heading off to accomplish the tasks. You may even want to ask if they need anything (advice, information, assistance) from anyone in the room, too. And manage everyone’s expectations by identifying a deadline for completion.

• Speak with receptionist about new waiting policy: Randy (5/7/16)
• Identify Word training options for lawyers: Jed with Lucy’s help (6/1/16)
• Communicate decision to insurance broker: Serena (5/9/16)
• Review possible contingency fee clients: Rosemary (ongoing)
• Identify dates and possible locations for retreat: Keith (next meeting)

3. Determine if there will be a next meeting and, if so, schedule it. While everyone is in the same room, agree to the day and time of the next meeting. (That way no one can say they didn’t hear about it.) Specify the location, time and to whom agenda items should be given in advance of that meeting.

It’s okay to not schedule the next meeting if none is necessary — if this is the end of the group’s work together or further meetings are to be on an as-needed basis. Don’t schedule a meeting just to schedule a meeting!

Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com

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For lawyers, web marketing is what the French call a devoir — a “have to.” But most of you would rather wash your hands of it. You didn’t go to school for an MBA or marketing degree. You have a whole desk full of case files demanding your time and marketing is hitching for a spot in the backseat, at best. But the web is where the clients are and in today’s marketplace, Google is the ground from which law firms grow.

So you hire people to help you — consultants and companies in the fields of digital marketing, SEO, social media and online advertising. Some are really easy to work with, but they’re about as common as an 8-1 ruling in the Supreme Court. The trick is to find a marketing firm that can get the job done at the right price while keeping your blood pressure below call-an-ambulance level.

Easier said than done, but here’s some advice.

Five Rules for Keeping the Peace with a Web Marketer

1. Know what your money is buying. Web marketing isn’t exactly inexpensive. Like most things in life, you get what you pay for. Just know what you’re paying for. A good marketing firm will offer itemized transparency for its services, and that’ll keep you from feeling resentful about any “phantom charges.” Always ask for the itemized list.

2. Slow and steady wins the race. Web marketing, especially SEO, is not an impatient person’s game. Top 10 search results are not achieved overnight. Sure, you might see a blip here and there, but if you’re looking for instant gratification, you’re searching in vain. Think of it like the stock market. You’re investing for long-term gain.

3. Micromanagement is a killer. Attempting to micromanage your marketing will put you and your marketer in that blood pressure danger zone. You’re the lawyer. They’re the web gurus. You each have jobs to do, so stick to those. It’ll do wonders for the relationship.

4. Don’t get emotional. This isn’t “Dr. Phil.” Your relationship means everything, but that relationship should be built on performance, dependability and communication — not personality. Trust is important, and it takes time, but you should assess the firm’s effectiveness on the services they provide, not the extent to which you like them as people. The Golden Rule applies here, too — treat your marketers with the courtesy and respect you expect from them.

5. Work with good people. With so much of web marketing based on content, you need to be careful about who you are allowing to write about the law on your behalf. Stick with experienced and highly credentialed marketers and vet them, preferably they use only experienced legal professionals or attorneys to write your content. Your state bar will thank you for it (in the form of zero discipline for marketing blunders). Here again, you get what you pay for.

Lessons from Working with Web Marketers

As a personal injury firm in a market as competitive as New York City, web marketing has been an integral component of our business development for many years. Personally, I have worked with a variety of legal marketers — including the familiar names — over the past decade. Here are a few lessons I’ve learned.

Understand what a web marketer does and doesn’t do. You should have defined business objectives for your firm. These objectives should serve as a framework to outline the responsibilities for both you and your marketing firm. What role will you play in achieving those objectives? What are your expectations for results from your web marketer? If you can’t describe the vision of your firm, how will they know how they can help you? If you can’t define your expectations, how can you hold them accountable?

I always tell our marketing company that it’s their job to bring me the inquiries and it’s my responsibility to close the deal. Hold them accountable for their role, but take ownership of your own responsibilities, too.

Plan to make money. Lawyers aren’t always the best accountants and, too often, a firm’s relationship with a web marketer is based on a hope that throwing money in a general direction might generate profit. That isn’t a plan, it is poor math. Engage in an active dialogue with your marketing vendor about how specific strategies are tied to your bottom-line growth. There are marketing strategies tied to short-term returns (e.g., pay-per-click advertising), medium-term growth (e.g., SEO) and long-term goals (e.g., social media marketing). See rule no. 1, above.

A recent Attorney at Work survey showed that only 20 percent of firms that use social media marketing engage a third party to manage it for them. I don’t know about you, but I can make more money working cases than I can by updating Facebook! Still, I doubted that a vendor would be able to deliver a return from Twitter or Facebook. And delegating social media to staff or an intern didn’t guarantee the best results, either. So, rather than blindly throw money at a one-size-fits-all social media package, we worked on a strategy with our vendor that didn’t break the bank and took a long-term view to generate return-on-investment. We planned to make money.

Work with someone who is focused on you. One of the most important qualifications for a marketing company is a business model that allows them to focus on my firm’s objectives. Yes, they need the marketing expertise and experience with law firms — but they also need focus. I choose not to work with marketing companies that also work with my competitors. I choose not to work with a company that is trying to be the biggest in their industry. I choose not to work with a vendor who charges the highest prices for the privilege of working with them. To reach my business objectives, it is a prerequisite that my marketer is involved in discussions about my law firm’s vision and development, and that their efforts are focused on successfully playing their role in that journey.

Building a successful relationship and online marketing strategy requires your participation in the process. You should not be involved in the day-to-day execution, but you should take the time to identify the right marketer for your firm, ask the right questions and hold your marketer accountable.

Need Web Marketing Advice for Attorneys? Ask

As the old saying goes, you don’t know what you don’t know. If you need web marketing advice, ask around. Maybe some of your law school friends practicing in other jurisdictions can share their experiences. A simple conversation can shed real insight.

You might be surprised by how much you’ll learn from the web marketers themselves. Ask them to educate you. Most are more than willing to elaborate on their history, their best practices and their approach to client management.

Working with web marketers isn’t always easy, but take these tips to heart and you’ll see long-term success instead of seeing red.

John Tucker is the Director of Case Management at the New York City personal injury law firm Kaplan Lawyers PC. John began his career handling claims for the insurance carrier Robert Plan. His unique understanding of the complex claims process enables him to expedite the process for clients, bringing swift resolution to their cases.

“We can surely do better,” read the last line of the email. 

“What the hell does that mean?” asked Margaret.

The young associate had just helped win a big case, and she was reading a “thank you for your efforts” email from the lead partner to the supporting team. Based on the tone of the email, it was hard to determine whether the last phrase was meant to encourage or scold. 

I wasn’t sure what message was intended, but knowing the author to be exacting and a little prickly, I thought probably the latter. 

This exchange got me thinking about the difficulty of written communications — and how technology seems to make it worse, not better.

The problem has been with us since we began to write, of course. I’m sure the cavemen were often offended by their relative size as painted on the cave wall. Did it depict them as larger than life or just fighting a puny adversary? History — and Shakespeare — is rife with miscommunications and their often humorous or dire consequences. 

Who Are You Talking To?

Obviously, we need to use words wisely. The first step is to consider your audience before you begin to write or speak. Lawyers deal with a diverse audience with diverse levels of mastery and comprehension of the language. Anyone having spent time in other parts of the U.S., or even different sides of town, can attest to different styles of communication and different word usage, ya’ll.

And, of course, people have different levels of emotional intelligence and sometimes send (or receive) messages subconsciously.

Shared history plays a part, as well. A casual conversation with a trusted friend allows for more latitude than a conversation with a new colleague or an adversary.

Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood

Every interaction — especially with a client under duress or a colleague who is stressed — has the potential to be misunderstood. Consider your words carefully, even in casual communications and conversation. As a partner, you should be aware that all of your remarks will be analyzed and rehashed by the younger lawyers. And, as I’ve said before, consider holding back your “fighting words” for when they’re actually needed.

Someone once described communications as a multi-step process:

1. You formulate your message.
2. You send your message to the receiver.
3. The receiver collects the message.
4. The receiver processes the message.
5. The receiver formulates a response.
6. The receiver sends the response to you.
7. You collect the response.
8. You process the message.
9. You decide if a response is needed.
10. Repeat as necessary.

At any step, the communication can be corrupted.

Just Pick Up the Damn Phone

We use many senses to facilitate basic communication. For verbal exchanges, we use body language, voice tone and rhythm and other non-verbal signals. With written communication we don’t have the luxury of non-verbal signals. In email and social media we can use emoticons to try to provide a sense of the message. But I discourage you from using emoticons in your business communications. Signing your name with a smiley face comes across as trite and unprofessional. Save it for communications with your good friends.

A lot of people seem to have a fear of phoning, especially younger lawyers. Given the emotional dryness of most written communication, however, it is a poor mechanism for potentially emotional communications. It may be difficult for you, but voice communication, possibly accompanied by a written one, is clearly the best form. It allows for non-verbal signs, follow-up, discussion and clarification of the message on the spot.

So the next time you find yourself looking for the exact emoticon that conveys “I’m deeply embarrassed but at the same time frustrated and repentant,” or some such complicated feeling, just pick up the damn phone!

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Yesterday, at 2 p.m. Eastern, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) released a second batch of the “Panama Papers” in a live and searchable (but stripped-down) database of more than 200,000 entities. Many of the activities unveiled in the papers are not illegal but many are, including laundering money, hiding evidence of crimes, avoiding sanctions and tax evasion.

Americans Identified

The database includes information on Americans tied to financial misconduct. NBC News, an ICIJ partner, has a site dedicated to its analysis of the developing stories related to the Panama Papers.

You can search the database yourself here. Time was limited to compose this post, but if you limit your search to the United States and you search on “Esq” and “law firm,” you will find some of the lawyers and firms referenced in the database. I am sure someone is walking down a long list of law firms (see below). Certainly, many Americans and American companies are included. A common search across all countries is “legal.”

“ICIJ is publishing the information in the public interest,” said Marina Walker Guevara, the ICIJ’s deputy director. The data comes from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca and covers information about nearly 214,000 offshore entities, companies, trusts, foundations and funds incorporated in 21 tax havens, from Hong Kong to Nevada in the United States. Walker said the data made available Monday represents a fraction of the Panama Papers, a trove of more than 11.5 million leaked files from Mossack Fonseca, which she called “one of the world’s top creators of hard-to-trace companies, trusts and foundations.”

The database is the largest release of information about secret offshore companies and the people behind them, called “beneficial owners,” whose identities are hidden from public scrutiny.

ICIJ is not disclosing raw documents or personal information such as bank accounts, e-mail exchanges and financial transactions, Walker said. As she added, the database does contain “a great deal of information about company owners, proxies and intermediaries in secrecy jurisdictions,” including, when available, “the names of the real owners of those opaque structures.”

The anonymous leaker of the so-called Panama Papers issued a manifesto on May 6th, saying the firestorm of controversy resulting from the leak of 11.5 million documents about offshore tax havens hasn’t triggered enough substantive action or condemnation.

“I decided to expose Mossack Fonseca because I thought its founders, employees and clients should have to answer for their roles in these crimes, only some of which have come to light thus far,” wrote the leaker in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, the German newspaper that received the documents last year and then shared them with the ICIJ.

The leaker also said, “For the record, I do not work for any government or intelligence agency, directly or as a contractor, and I never have. My viewpoint is entirely my own.”

According to another NBC article, the IRS has told Americans to come clean before it reads the Panama Papers, which it will use to bolster current investigations and to initiate new ones. The Guardian had previously reported that President Obama has called for international tax reform — and that the Department of Justice is also examining the Panama Papers for evidence of wrongdoing.

While illegal activities will no doubt be found, much of the problem is that sheltering money from taxes is often legal, as President Obama pointed out.

The Am Law 200 & Global 100

This morning The American Lawyer (sub.req.) updated its story, “Dozens of Big Firms to Appear in New ‘Panama Papers’ Database,” listing more than 30 current and former Am Law 200 and Global 100 law firms, along with a long list of other U.S. and global firms that appear in the ICIJ database. Today’s “Second Tranche of Offshore Docs Reveals More Big Firms,” lists several more. (Ed. Note: Click over to RTL for a list of those law firms.)

The ICIJ noted in a disclaimer that there are “legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts” and that it does not “intend to suggest or imply that any persons, companies or other entities have broken the law or otherwise acted improperly.”

Stay Tuned …

This is going to be a “drip, drip, drip” story as journalists seek to connect the dots. There is no doubt that a lot of law firms and other companies are having a miserable day today.

Sharon D. Nelson (@SharonNelsonEsq) is nationally known as an expert in digital forensics, information security and information technology. Along with John Simek she heads Sensei Enterprises, Inc., a digital forensics, legal technology and information security firm based in Fairfax, VA. Popular speakers and authors, they have written several books, including “The 2008-2015 Solo and Small Firm Legal Technology Guides” and “Encryption Made Simple for Lawyers.” Sharon blogs at Ride the Lightning and co-hosts the Digital Detectives podcast.

Ed. Note: This special report appears today on Sharon Nelson’s Ride the Lightning blog. Be sure to click over to RTL for updates on the unfolding Panama Papers story.

Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com

It’s 6 p.m. You are about to put the final touches on a brief that is due tomorrow when a message pops up on your laptop. It informs you that a third party has gained control of your system and encrypted all your files. To unencrypt your files, you must pay a ransom.

Every single file you have on your computer system is now unreadable. Thanks to this ransomware attack, your practice has basically been shut down while your system is held hostage.

What Is Ransomware?

Ransomware is a type of malevolent program that limits the functionality of victims’ computers. For example, it could disable your computer altogether, encrypt your files so you can’t read them or bar applications like Word or a web browser from working. Ransomware attacks have grown exponentially in number in the past few years.

The most common methods of becoming infected include unknowingly via a download (clicking on an infected site, ad or email that prompts an illicit download of the malware) or via program weaknesses (an outdated operating system, for example). After the ransomware is downloaded, generally only a unique “key” can decrypt the victim’s files.

Ransom amounts vary, but the price — depending on the hacker behind the scheme — is usually about $500. Larger corporations may face significantly higher ransoms. Often the message will imply that you have been using your computer illegally and must pay a government fine as a punishment. The hackers normally demand payment in bitcoins, a digital form of currency that is difficult to track.

Ransomware is big business for hackers. According to McAfee, there were more than 4 million samples of ransomware in the second quarter of 2015. Those instances are expected to grow in 2016. The FBI estimates that the Cryptowall program alone accrued over $18 million by June 2015.

Responding to Ransomware

Many ransomware programs are extremely difficult to combat — that is what hackers count on. However, there are some steps you can take to work around a virus, rather than simply paying off hackers.

One way is to recover files. The easiest way to fix a virus is to clean it off the infected properties and restore the information from backup systems. That is why you should frequently back up your files and use a service that provides redundant backup facilities.

When a firm has the option of paying hackers a lot of money or losing a couple of minutes of work and restoring from files that have been backed up, the choice becomes obvious. If you are not completely satisfied with your backup system and provider, now is a good time to conduct a review and make any necessary changes.

Not all hackers are criminals. Some white-hat hackers work to provide keys that can break ransomware encryptions. You can send these white hats your infected files to be analyzed by experts. Then, they provide the key to unlock the files, typically free of charge.

Law firms can also use file-accessing auditing to open their files. This functionality, which is built into Microsoft Windows and available through most secure, cloud-based solutions, tracks each time a user opens a file or folder. By monitoring the logging activity, the firm’s IT professionals can identify patterns or instances of unauthorized access. Through file-accessing auditing, you can launch a course of action such as stopping the server or removing file share so that you can halt the attack.

Avoiding Ransomware Attacks

Of course, the most effective approach to fighting ransomware is avoiding attacks in the first place — by using both technological and human approaches.

Technological approaches involve having an extremely robust spam-filtering service that will automatically block certain file types that may transmit viruses. You should also use pop-up blockers and always keep your software up to date so hackers cannot access servers through older, vulnerable software.

Also, consider storing your data in the cloud instead of directly on the hard drives of laptops, computers and smartphones. This can give you another, more sophisticated level of protection for your information — assuming you’ve done your due diligence on your cloud provider. While a laptop may be infected, the files in the cloud will remain safe.

Firms should work with IT and security professionals to ensure that all administrative access and levels are securely locked down and that only a small number of authorized users have advanced privileges. A ransomware virus potentially has access to every single program that an individual user’s device does. By ensuring that your staff and attorneys only have permissions to access the information they absolutely must have, critical files and systems can remain cordoned off from many potential attacks.

You should also promote awareness of the dangers of ransomware among your firm’s attorneys and staff through frequent updates and training so that everyone knows what ransomware is, how it can infect systems and the best security practices to follow to prevent it.

Finally, you must always back up your data to ensure that you will have updated backup files to replace infected ones.

While law firms have been hearing for years that they could be the victims of a cyberattack, the danger has never been clearer. In the past two months alone, the media has reported investigations into cyberattacks on several major law firms (where hackers may have been looking for information to use for insider trading) as well as the leaking of the Panama Papers from Mossack Fonseca.

Law firms hold some of their clients’ most important trade secrets, corporate data and sensitive information about potential deals and are being actively targeted by hackers. In this environment, every firm needs to understand the risks ransomware attacks pose and take steps to minimize them.

Joe Kelly formally launched Legal Workspace in 2010 and leads the organization as the CEO. He also founded Denver-based Business Network Consulting, Ltd., recognized by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest-growing companies in the nation for five consecutive years. Splitting his time between Dallas and Denver, Joe is a passionate entrepreneur who is constantly looking to leverage technology to make it easier for law firms and other organizations to do business.

Lawyers love lawyer advertising because it’s all about lawyers. The only problem is, this is what that looks like to the rest of the world:

Lawyers have been conditioned, from time immemorial, to believe that successful marketing means broadcasting superiority. You must have won more false awards, and higher verdicts, and would have established further contrived rankings.

To a point, it’s helpful to show that you’re good at what you do; but continually attempting to avenge yourself as best is necessarily a losing game. The perceived superiority of this one-ups-manshipper strategy leads to the creation of massively hyperbolic ads, like this one:

(I watch the Super Bowl so I can learn about new Doritos’ flavors, broseph.)

Lawyers are real worried about branded networks — as they should be — because branded networks have access to some major fundage, way more than you. And they can throw a lot of that money at advertising. The difference, however, between the branded networks and your average lawyer is that the networks waste far fewer of those dollars and then also better track their effectiveness.

Let’s examine one of Avvo’s advertisements:

Notice how starkly different this style of advertising is when compared with traditional lawyer marketing: It’s focused on the brand, not the individual. It’s genuinely funny — with hints of the absurd that, nevertheless, do not edge into fantasy. The focus is on the client’s problem, not the superiority of Avvo — at least, not in any overt way. There is a visual call to action at the end, highlighting a simple method for requesting service. These ads ran during “Better Call Saul,” which is a spot where many laypersons get regular exposure to the lives of solo and small firm practitioners.

Run down that list, and you probably can’t identify one thing that solo and small firm lawyers do well in their own advertising.

Six-Pack: Tips to Improve Your Marketing

Let’s talk about how lawyers can improve their advertising tactics, based on the foregoing.

What’s your problem? Rather than focusing on your war chest of accomplishments, focus on the potential client’s problem, and how you may alleviate it.

What do you do? Focus on the services provided, rather than on the person(s) providing the service. (By the way, this is one reason it’s so hard to sell a law firm: because the value is so obviously derived from individual partners’ influences. Creating a brand around the firm, rather than the individual lawyers, imparts broader value.)

Be (intentionally) funny. There is a line of thinking that goes like this: Lawyers aren’t funny. I don’t necessarily think that’s true; I think lawyers are afraid to be funny because that can be taken for a lack of seriousness, and perceived as weakness. Of course, as the middle example above shows, lawyers, in trying to be funny, just end up savagely parodying themselves better than Juvenal himself could have. Channel Horace, instead, if you’re going to that. Or, better yet: target the humor of situations, rather than calling out your own perceived inanity.

Be authentic.

Respect your (potential) clients. Some lawyers have a tendency to talk down to people, which is a terrifically bad habit. Instead, think of your potential clients as people, intelligent in their own right, who require a savvy guide through a process that can be time-consuming and confounding.

In your place. Think about where you broadcast your advertising. Lawyers too often obsess over wide dissemination, rather than targeted distribution. However, the latter is far more effective, especially in a niche practice.

You can do all that, or you can just keep kickin’ ass.

Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com

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Big social media faux pas are not uncommon these days. From politicians to airlines to big brands, no one seems immune to a misguided post that goes viral and is ultimately shared with the world.

Lawyers, generally late-adopters, are just now beginning to understand how social media fits into their branding, marketing or communications strategy. And they face the double learning curve: understanding social media etiquette and how to use it in accordance with the rules of professional conduct. But that doesn’t mean you should put the etiquette piece second to the ethical piece. Using social media incorrectly or ineffectively can be just as damaging to your professional reputation — potentially worse.

The key to using social media effectively and ethically comes down to one thing: expectations.

Understand What Social Media Users Expect

If you understand what social media users expect — and, just as importantly, what they don’t expect — you are likely to be both effective and ethically compliant. 

At its core, social media is about authentic engagement.

Social media users, be they readers, listeners or gawkers, are seeking authentic voices among the barrage of information noise they face every day. Pitching, soliciting, bragging or faking are quickly dismissed or ignored online.

Similarly, social media users are looking to be engaged. Social media not only is designed to connect people, it actually incentivizes them to engage with each other. This is a new marketing paradigm — and a different type of marketing for lawyers.

Before social media, nearly all lawyer advertising used a one-way “outbound” methodology. For most advertisers, outbound media became a way to shout at the world about how good their products were. Or, in the case of lawyers, how good their credentials, win-rate, toughness or legal services were. The media didn’t really facilitate two-way dialogue.

Social media is drastically different. It’s not a one-way communication medium. It’s an engagement medium. And it’s not even a two-way conversation, but a multi-way one. And this is where lawyers frequently fail. Instead of using these platforms to engage they use them for one-way outbound communications — the same way they’ve always marketed their firms. They shout at the world about how great they are and use social media to solicit business the same way they once used television ads or the phonebook.

For this reason, many lawyers are ineffective or even unethical when using social media.

But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here are five examples of lawyers and law firms failing to understood what social media users expect.

Five Ways to Fail at Social Media

1. Following no one. One of the best examples of a social media facepalm by a law firm is the Skadden Arps Twitter account. Skadden, rather overtly, seems to believe that Twitter is a one-way communication medium. They don’t follow anyone on Twitter. They have only followers. This reminds one of the old adage about passing the ball in American football: There are only three things that can happen when you throw a pass and two of them are bad. There are only two reasons that Skadden follows no one and neither of them results in the firm looking “good.” Beyond appearing unaware that the medium exists precisely to encourage engagement, it also comes off as quite arrogant — an accusation that lawyers would do well to try to minimize. Does Skadden think there is no one worth listening to on Twitter?

Fail.

2. Using spammy marketing text. Many lawyers are on social media because they’ve been told they “have to be.” A decent subset has let their marketing department or an outsourced marketing resource handle (read automate) their social media. Frequently this results in hashtag-filled, nonsensical or repetitive posts that are unwelcome, questionably effective and arguably unethical.

These three Tweets — completely coincidentally — ended up next to each other in my searching for examples of lawyer social media usage. Something seems suspicious.

The similarities here might just be coincidence, but remember social media users are expecting authentic engagement. Spammy, repetitive and incoherent posts are neither authentic nor engaging.

Facepalm.

3. Using social media as a megaphone. Kudos to the lawyers who do try to adopt social media and actually sign up for a service. That’s a great first step. Where many fall down, though, is when they apply a “set it and forget it” mindset. Remember, users are expecting “engagement.” If you are on social media, you should plan to engage and respond to the interactions and conversations happening there.

One common example is lawyers’ responses to negative reviews on sites such as Avvo or Yelp — or, more significantly, their silence. The reasons lawyers stay silent are varied but, unfortunately, they often relate to an unwillingness to engage online. A lot of lawyers prefer to simply ignore negative online feedback rather than understand how to appropriately respond to it. Similarly, there are a number of lawyers and firms who have the kind of spammy and repetitive posts mentioned above; or with whom others have attempted to engage on social media only to have those attempts ignored.

Lawyers, if you are going to sign up for social media, you need to engage others there.

4. Leaving professionalism at the office. Using social media to expand your online presence effectively requires remembering and adhering to your general professional duties as well as your legal ethics duties. As I’ve said, by meeting social media users’ expectations, most lawyers will generally adhere to the rules of professional conduct.

Despite the fact that online meltdowns and feuds frequently get publicity, they aren’t generally good for a lawyer’s business. Further, they can end up being seriously damaging when they either go viral or violate professional ethics rules. Two examples:

The Van Dyke Law Firm’s reaction to an apparently negative review couldn’t be more unprofessional.

It might not cross the professional ethics line, but name-calling and bounty hunting online is not the way to enhance your brand. While this two-word review speaks for itself, with social media it’s wise to remember that there are hundreds, if not thousands, of readers who will be much more put off by the lawyer’s vehement response than by the negative review itself. Mr. Van Dyke may feel targeted, or even feel professionally wronged by this review, but handling it with decorum is the far better choice in the long run.

If Van Dyke didn’t cross the line ethically, the lawyer in In re Skinner certainly did. Having received a negative client review online, Attorney Skinner posted on the internet personal and confidential information about the reviewing client that had been gained in her professional relationship with the client. After the Georgia Supreme Court rejected her plea for a “review panel reprimand,” the lowest form of discipline in Georgia, Skinner was issued a formal public reprimand.

These misfires are pretty obvious, but it’s important to remember that social media has dramatically reduced the distance between the angry thoughts and ideas in one’s head and the rest of the world. While lawyers used to shout at the car dashboard after a bad day, the internet provides a close and dangerously powerful medium to “vent before you think.”

Ultimately, even this comes back to expectations: Social media users expect engagement, but they still expect lawyers on social media to fully live up to their expected and actual professional obligations.

Losing your cool on social media just isn’t cool.

5. Ignoring expectations. These facepalms may lead you to believe social media fails are more the rule than the exception. While that may be true among lawyers at this moment in time, it is certainly not true across industries. You can find many examples of excellent social media use from which to draw. The key, as successful users have learned, is understanding and meeting your audiences’ expectations. Do that, and hands will rarely meet faces for the facepalm when your followers read your social media posts.

Dan Lear is Director of Industry Relations for online legal marketplace Avvo. He is a lawyer, blogger and legal industry gadfly. As a technology-focused business lawyer he advised companies from startups to the Fortune 100 and helped develop agreements and terms for early cloud services offerings well before the notion of “the cloud” had entered the common cultural consciousness. Since his transition from tech lawyer to legal technologist, Dan has been featured in legal industry press and in 2015, named to the Fastcase 50, preceded by being honored with the Washington State Bar Association President’s Award in 2014. Follow Dan@rightbrainlaw.

Resilience is the ability to persevere through adversity and come out stronger than you were before.

Resilience is a skill that anyone can learn and apply to any area of their life. People are not “born resilient”; it’s not a personality trait that some have and others do not. People become resilient as they respond to difficulties in their lives.

So the good news is that you can become more resilient. The bad news is that your life requires hardship to develop resilience. Then again, if you were living with the delusion that you could avoid hardship in your life, let me dispel that notion right now. It is not a question of whether you will encounter hardship. It is a question of how you will respond to it.

Turning a Hurdle into an Opportunity

No matter what your particular stress is — client issues, financial anxiety, overwhelmed by technology, opposing counsel’s attitude — changing the way you think about and respond to that stress can turn a dreaded situation into an opportunity for building resilience. One place to start: Make a list of the things in your day that drain you of energy and joy. What would you prefer to avoid or actively wish would magically go away?

While there are many ways of increasing resilience, these three tips will help you to invest your time and energy well.

1. What else could this be? One key component of resilience is the ability to see things from multiple perspectives. You limit your ability to do that when you get locked into interpreting a particular interaction or situation in a fixed way. The classic way of limiting perspective on a stressor is to think of it as a crisis, or impending crisis. “My client is not paying my fee” turns into a fear that this will result in making no money, becoming homeless and starving on the street one day. Any crisis will make you feel a heightened level of stress, which either prompts you to avoid the situation or attack it — the “fight or flight” syndrome.

Asking yourself “what else could this be” is a creative problem-solving technique that helps to challenge your assumptions. Or, another way to put this is to ask: “What is this problem an opportunity for?” Seeing a stressful event as an opportunity will allow you to see potential upsides to a stressor and use it for good. So, for example, a stressful confrontation becomes an opportunity to practice speaking calmly and confidently to an upset client, thereby making you better able to handle these situations.

2. Hobbies — they’re not just for retirement. Games and hobbies are not child’s play or activities you should postpone until retirement. Hobbies and fun activities are essential for creative thinking and well-being. Not only do they provide a way to take a break from work (or constantly thinking about work), they also are an opportunity to use different parts of your brain, interact with others differently and see things from a different perspective.

Feeling stumped about how to handle a problem? Stop trying to solve it. Taking a break  and doing something completely different often helps to provide “aha moments” of insight.

3. Friends and family — yes, they’re pretty important. Let’s face it, law school and the demanding legal environment have required you to spend less time with friends and family. It is a necessary sacrifice most lawyers make to get through law school, pass the bar and start a legal career. Unfortunately, what starts as a temporary sacrifice can transform into a lifestyle.

Having a strong social support network is essential to resilience. The most resilient people have a network they feel supported by, know they can turn to for help, and to whom they offer help in a pattern of mutual support. Nothing increases the weight of a burden more than thinking you are alone in that struggle. Talking with friends, family and colleagues can help give you a different perspective, validate your feelings and concerns, and help you think through options that you might not have considered before.

Be Well, Be Resilient

Resilience is a skill that needs resistance to strengthen, not unlike our physical muscles. So look for opportunities to choose to use the barriers in your life as a resilience workout routine. The more you do, the greater sense of control you will feel in your life.

Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com

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If you are a solo practitioner, of counsel, or a partner at a law firm, you have at least two roles: attorney and entrepreneur. Your time and energy are split between performing client work and making sure new business is coming in the door.

One way attorneys educate themselves about effective business and marketing practices is by attending CLEs. But knowing how important it is to market yourself to your prospective audience, why limit yourself to only legal industry programs?

Try on a Fresh Perspective

You can supplement your CLEs by attending non-legal mainstream business and marketing events for entrepreneurs. They will expose you to new ideas, people and perspectives. It’s an especially good idea given that the legal profession tends to lag behind the times when it comes to things like web-based tactics.

I love attending mainstream events and probably attend as many non-legal online and in-person business and marketing events as I do CLEs. I always come away with tips and suggestions to help me run my practice more effectively and inspiration from other industries. Often these are tips that I’ve never heard at legal events.

Of course, as an attorney, I have to verify that the suggestions I want to try comport with my state’s rules of professional responsibility.

Over the next few months, I’m attending two conferences: BlogPaws in Phoenix (a conference for people who blog about pets) and Content Marketing World in Cleveland (a business marketing conference). Both events will provide valuable opportunities to develop my skills. Did I mention I get to bring my dog to BlogPaws?

Here are some of the sessions I’m most excited to attend so I can apply the ideas to my law practice:

At BlogPaws

• Reputation Management
• How to Establish Yourself as an Expert and Create Viral Content
• What Does Your LinkedIn Profile Say about Your Professional Brand?
• How to Get Off the Blogging Hamster Wheel, Attract an Audience, and Still Have Time to Enjoy Life

At Content Marketing World

• What to Do When You’ve Written All the “Helpful” Content
• How to Manage Content Effectively in a Complex Organization
• How Brilliant Brands Create Less Content and Deliver Bigger Success
• 50 Essential Content Marketing Hacks
• How to Get Way More Traffic from Your Existing Content
• How to Use Improv Techniques to Improve Your Storytelling

How to Find Useful Events

If you need help finding mainstream conferences to attend, ask other entrepreneurs in your city what events they attend. Research your favorite business book authors and see where they are scheduled to speak. Some of the mainstream speakers that have been most helpful to me include Jay Baer, Rand Fishkin, Rae Hoffman, Tim Riesterer, Robert Rose, Peter Shankman, Pamela Slim, Evo Terra and Gary Vaynerchuk.

When researching possible webinars and conferences to attend, consider local, national and online events to build up your business acumen and marketing skills. There are a lot of events to consider, no matter what your time and budget constraints might be.

Ruth Carter will be speaking at BlogPaws and Content Marketing World, where she’ll be answering content legal questions.

Image ©ImageZoo.

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If you’re not a so-called millennial, this post is for you. If you are, stay tuned for Linda Hazelton’s follow-up on post on how to communicate with baby boomers and Gen Xers.

As of 2015, millennials are the largest age group in the workforce, according to American think tank Pew Research Group. More than 33 percent of American workers are millennials, and 20 percent of lawyers are millennials. And, according to an Ernst & Young study, in 2025 millennials will make up 75 percent of the global workforce.

Here’s another statistic to ponder: Heather Morse-Geller and Jonathan Fitzgarrald researched in-house counsel ranks as well as corporate C-suites and learned that millennials are found in greater proportions in those quarters than among law firms.

Eight Things to Know About Working with Millennials

So what does this mean? It’s time to improve communications with millennials to make the most of the valuable skills and resources they offer.

1. Purpose matters. Millennials — more so than prior generations — want to have a sense of purpose. They want to be part of something larger than themselves. To engage them, communicate context, big picture and importance. “Our client must reduce its workforce. Your review of their employment manuals and contracts will help them achieve their goals in the most legal, humane and effective way. Make note of anything that references layoffs and highlight anything else that seems important to you.” This is likely to lead to a better work product and a more involved associate than saying, “Review these documents and make note of anything that refers to a reduction in force.”

2. Feedback is essential. I have never worked with a law firm where associates didn’t ask for more and better feedback, and the demand for clear, concrete, real-time performance and status reviews is only increasing. Even though every kid may have gotten a trophy, millennials don’t need or want your comments to be sugar-coated. Feedback should be given frequently, and as the occasion arises. After action reviews (and during action reviews) offer numerous opportunities for training and education for all parties involved.

• What was supposed to happen?
• What actually happened?
• Why was there a difference?
• What can we learn from this?

For the future: Try to catch them doing something right and comment on it. When something happens that isn’t optimal, make your comments future-oriented. “The next time you suspect you’ll have trouble meeting a deadline, please let me know immediately so that we can strategize a solution.”

3. Provide clear guidelines. Stop saying “as soon as possible.” Start saying something like, “Our client wants to have this in hand to review at least two weeks before the brief must be filed. We’ll need time to respond to their questions and comments. I’ll need some time to review your draft, so that means I need a draft from you by Sept. 9 — four weeks before the final deadline.” And don’t say, “Research this and give me your thoughts.” Instead, this provides better guidance: “Research this and then prepare a bulleted list of the salient points by Friday at 9 a.m. If it seems as if it will take more than four hours — once you’ve gotten started — come back to discuss it with me.”

4. Inspect what you expect. After you’ve given an assignment, take the initiative — yes, you — to follow up. “How is the research coming along? Are you on track to provide me a report by Friday morning?” If it rankles you to have to check up on them, either ask your assistant to do so or tell the assignee to check in at specified intervals, and then you or your assistant should calendar those check-in times. This should help to avoid having to finish a project yourself at the last minute.

If you don’t like being the recipient of upward delegation, try asking, “Is this your best work?” If you sense hesitation, send them away to continue until they are satisfied.”

Finally, if, despite your best efforts at assigning clearly, you receive work that you must redo because of timing, sit down and conduct an after-action review, showing (for example) line-by-line what you changed and why. If you don’t take the time to do this, prepare yourself to be redoing their work often.

5. Put their tech addiction to use. Let reality work to your advantage instead of fighting it. Have millennial associates offer lunch-and-learn sessions to you (or to clients) on how to make the most of a program or application.

6. Set stretch goals. Challenge them to do their best. As a millennial recently recounted, “I keep asking my manager for a review. He just says to keep doing what I’m doing. I want him to push me — to challenge me to do my best.”

7. Don’t be stuffy; don’t be snarky. Just don’t.

8. Communicate with clients according to their preferences. Train your millennials to do so as well. If your client prefers Skype to face-to-face meetings, then act accordingly. If your baby-boomer clients prefer written reports over texts and in-person meetings, then that’s what you and your millennials should offer. Every situation deserves its own strategy.

Millennials are the future; invest in them wisely!

Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com

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