Tag Archives: social media for attorneys

Law Firm Marketing and Design Lessons Learned While Redoing My Website

Posted on

Earlier this year, I embarked on a months-long process of building a new, more sophisticated and customized website, which I’m happy to unveil at cogentlegal.com. This post will share some of what I learned about website design and law marketing through the process.

First, let me clear up confusion if you think you’re already looking at my website. You’re not—this is my blog, built separately on a WordPress platform—and I deliberately keep the two separate. I subscribe to the view that a firm’s website and blog are two related yet distinct vehicles with separate roles to play. Continue reading →

Some Pitfalls of Legal Blogging and 5 Favorite Law Blogs

Posted on

I admit, I’m not the most consistent blogger. I try to publish a post at a minimum weekly, but work intervenes and makes blogging with regularity a challenge. I go for quality over quantity in blogging and respect the fact that I probably have 30 seconds or less to grab and hold the reader’s attention. (Hang in there, this turns practical, I promise!)

Are you an attorney who blogs—or have you been advised to start a blog? If so, I recommend a recent post on Lawyerist.com by Sam Glover called “What to Blog About (or: How to Keep Blogging),” which gives smart advice on how to avoid adding to the abundance of what he calls “crappy, dead law blogs” with “second-rate posts nobody wanted to read, anyway.”

That post got me thinking not only about my own blog, but about those blogs in the legal field I admire for sharing useful information in an authentic voice. I’d like to take this post to highlight a few that I regularly read. Continue reading →

Social Media Ethics for Attorneys: An Evolving Topic That Shouldn’t Be Ignored

Posted on

We all know procrastinators who wait until a week before the annual deadline to fulfill their mandatory MCLE requirements on subjects that many find the least interesting, such as ethics, substance abuse and diversity. My law school recently hosted a day-long program in late January that offered six hours of MCLE workshops to reach those attorneys who procrastinate, and I was asked to do one of the presentations. (Sounds like fun so far!)

I decided to focus on the ethics of social media for attorneys, which I genuinely find interesting and relevant. Continue reading →

Social Media Ethics for Lawyers: 4 Things Attorneys Should Not Do Online

Posted on

This post is written by my wife, Sarah Lavender Smith, who works with me at Cogent Legal as the director of communications.

Yesterday I attended a panel discussion called “Legal Social Media Gone Wild: A Look at the Ethics Involved in Lawyer Participation Online,” sponsored by the Bay Area Chapter of the Legal Marketing Association. The wide-ranging talk touched on sticky issues that have emerged as attorneys go online to network, to promote their expertise and to connect with potential clients.

Attorneys’ seemingly benign social media activity can and sometimes does collide with the rules of professional conduct. Trying to promote themselves online while mitigating this risk “is like skiing while leaning backwards—it’s very difficult to do,” said one panelist, Adrian Lurssen, co-founder and VP of strategic development at JD Supra (which, BTW, is a terrific service for legal news syndication; you can check out our profile and articles there).

Here are a few take-away lessons for attorneys and legal marketers from the panel of experts, which in addition to Lurssen included: Miles B. Cooper of Rouda Feder Tietjen & McGuinn, John Steele of the blog Legal Ethics Forum, and moderator Lydia Bednerik, marketing director at Wendel Rosen Black & Dean. Continue reading →

5 Social Media Tips for Law School Grads and Solo Practitioners to Help Find a Job and Build a Practice

Posted on

When I graduated from law school in 1993, job searching via social media consisted of using the Yellow Pages to find a law firm to cold call. Wannabe associates like me attended job fairs and perhaps asked a parent’s friend to write a letter of recommendation. In that pre-Internet day of dial-up modems, none of us could network virtually.

Obviously, the path to finding an associate attorney position—or going solo and building a practice—has greatly changed and widened over the years, but recent law school graduates have it really tough these days, much as my peers and I did in the early ’90s when big firms had big layoffs. In light of this challenging economic climate, my law school asked that I co-present a seminar to help third-years find their first job post-graduation. I was asked to talk about “the do’s and don’ts of using LinkedIn and Facebook for your job search.” Much of the information that follows about using social media also can help attorneys who are building their solo or small-firm practices. Continue reading →