For many attorneys and law firms, newsletters bring in a lot of business. If you don’t have a newsletter, here are ten reasons you should:
- To get more business from current clients. A newsletter is an effective way to let clients know about your other services and show them how they can benefit from those services, without being “salesy”.
- To get repeat business from former clients. People who hired you once will hire you again–when they’re ready.
AÂ newsletter is a great way to stay in touch with them until they are. - To add value to your services. A newsletter can provide an added benefit for clients. Give clients “subscriptions”. Put a price tag on the newsletter but send it free to current clients.
- To educate prospects. A newsletter that provides prospective clients with valuable information helps them make better decisions, allows you to demonstrate your expertise, and provides a mechanism for staying in touch with them until they are ready to hire you.
- To generate word-of-mouth referrals. Newsletters have pass-along value. A good newsletter will be shared with an average of three other people, even more online.
- To build your contact list. You can offer visitors to your web site a subscription to your newsletter in return for providing their email (and other contact information). When speaking or networking, you can offer to send your newsletter to people who provide you with their business card.
- To establish expertise and credibility. Your writing helps prospects, publishers, reporters, meeting planners, and referral sources see you as the expert you are.
- To provide content for, and traffic to, your web site. Your newsletter can drive traffic to your web site or blog. Your newsletter content can be re-used as content on your web site or blog, generating additional traffic from search engines and social media.
- To shorten the sales process. People who respond to your newsletter are better informed about what you do and pre-sold on your ability to do it, in contrast to people who come to you via advertising.
- To serve as a networking tool. Your newsletter is a tool to reach out to other professionals. You can interview them for an article, conduct a survey, ask them to write an article, or ask permission to put them on your mailing list.
A newsletter requires an investment of time, and possibly some capital, but the return on that investment can be substantial. If you want to grow your practice, a newsletter is one of the most highly leveraged marketing activities you can do.
Can you imagine a world without lawyers? I’ll bet Amanda Knox can’t.
Lawyers are routinely vilified. Epithets abound. We are the subject of the cruelest jokes.
And yet, where do people turn when they are in trouble? Whom do they go to for advice when they want to protect their rights? Who defends the indefensible?
Amanda Knox was just released from an Italian prison after a four year nightmare. Without lawyers, she would still be languishing in her cell.
Without lawyers fighting the good fight, our rights, our entire way of life, would devolve and anarchy would ensue. We must never forget how important we are, not just to the individuals we serve, but to the society we live in.
In Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Dick the Butcher says, “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”. This is often quoted as a denouncement of lawyers but it is a misreading. Dick was referring to ways a rebellion in the planning might be successful. He recognized that to succeed, they must get rid of those who know and enforce a system of laws. It is, in a roundabout way, an endorsement of lawyers.
Lawyers, be proud of what you do. Defend not just your clients but your profession. Educate your clients and your friends about what you do, but also why it matters.
But don’t stop there. When you see a colleague behaving in a way that belies the dignity of our profession, call him on it. Counsel him. And, if necessary, report him.
Be a champion of the high standards our oath demands and exemplify those standards in your words and deeds. Our profession must police itself. The alternative is a Bar that does it for us, but too often, they go too far.
In a victory for common sense, a Florida court just struck down as vague one of its Bar Association’s limits on lawyer advertising. A bar association should enact rules of professional conduct that define standards of behavior and it should provide redress for the most egregious transgressions of those standards. But when a bar association imposes vague, arbitrary, and unreasonable standards upon its members, as Florida has long been criticized for doing, it says to the world, “We don’t trust our members and neither should you.”
Bar associations can improve the image of lawyers not by policing them more but by trusting them more.