I’m speaking this Wednesday night at the Beverly Hills Bar Association; the topic is “Ethical Marketing Techniques for Solos and Small Firms.”
If you can’t make it (and I’d love to see any Socially Awkward readers there!), here are the basic points I’m going to cover:
- Staying on the right side of the Rules of Professional Conduct when communicating online is actually pretty easy – as long as you treat social media as more analogous to a cocktail party than, say, a billboard ad.
- Any attorney remotely concerned about generating business – whether online or offline, consumer or business – is failing massively if they haven’t created at least three separate places online where potential clients can find information about them and their approach to the practice of law.
- Reputation management is becoming more and more important as “word of mouth” moves online. Whether you like it or not, legal services can and will be reviewed, just as toasters and hotel stays are. Understanding how to respond to negative online feedback in a productive way is critical.
It bears mentioning that it remains harder than it should be for lawyers to “stay ethical” when it comes to advertising. I’ve written about some of the reasons why, but I will likely pen a longer post in the near future on the problems created by our lawyerly bias toward regulation.