the [non]billable hour

Advertise What Matters (to Clients)

If you're wondering what to put on your website (or in that next yellow pages ad), take a cue from the Central Florida Regional Hospital in Sanford, Florida.  Instead of trumpeting just how great their doctors are, they're using a nearby billboard to display a real-time statistic that lots of people care about: ER wait times.

From the Orlando Sentinel:

To find out how long the wait is in the emergency room at Central Florida Regional Hospital in Sanford, you can check its Web site, send a text, or, now, cruise past a billboard on Interstate 4.

The hospital this week started posting its ER wait times on the billboard, on the eastbound side near State Road 46. It's part of a campaign to use technology to spread the word about decreasing the wait.

"Putting our wait times to see a physician in real time on a billboard is just one more step in educating the community about our service," said Wendy Brandon, the hospital's chief executive officer. The wait times to see a physician are updated every 30 minutes and reflect an average from the previous four hours.

What do your clients want to know about you?  Do they see the answer in your advertising?  They should.

Sell Me This Pencil

Here's a list of 100 Great Interview Questions, that includes most of the obvious ones, such as "What are your weaknesses?" and "What's your ideal company?" etc. 

However, there was one "question" that stood out to me above all others:

Sell me this pencil.

Think about that for a moment.  The question doesn't require an answer, it requires a performance.  I wonder how it might impact hiring by law firms if their interviewers asked it just once in a while...

Introduce Your Staff to Your Clients

Here's a great idea from the London Underground (subway) via the U.K.'s Creative Review.  The Underground hired photographer Maria Cox to visit each of the London Underground's 264 stations and take a picture of someone who worked there. 

The photographs are combined with some information about each person, and then displayed at the station where he or she works.  Here's the profile of John Osborne, a customer services assistant at the Shepherd's Bush Line station:



It makes me wonder how many businesses here in the states could benefit from a similar approach.  I think many clients would be more apt to hire a firm that cared enough about their employees to feature them in this way.  What do you think?

Some Tips for the Suddenly Solo

The fellas at Lawyerist caught up with me in Duluth after one of my presentations at Minnesota CLE's "Strategic Solutions for Solo and Small Firms" conference. Sam Glover asked me to share some tips for the "Suddenly Solo" lawyers out there.  Here's the video:

Interview with Matt Homann from Lawyerist Media on Vimeo.

Business Card or Brochure? Both.

I'm headed to the ACLEA conference in Salt Lake City this week. I'm a new member of the Association of Continuing Legal Education professionals (I know, the acronym needs some help) and am looking forward to my first ACLEA event -- especially because I'm doing lots more speaking about innovation, creativity, marketing, alternative billing, etc. to lawyers, firms and at CLE's.

Since I'm working on a website redesign (live in August) that helps show visually what I do, I thought I'd use some of the images we've created for the web on new 3" x 5" business cards that double as a kind of brochure. (I'm using a 6" x 5" card folded in half).

Here's the inside of the folded card:

And here's the back and front:

And here are the LexThink cards I've been using. Let me know what you think!  Here's the card in pdf format.

Using Facebook Ads to Find Legal Work

Attention Law Students:  There's a great post over at One Day One Job abut Using Facebook Ads to Make Employers Hunt You Down that's definitely worth a read. It recaps an experiment where job seekers used targeted Facebook ads to reach people who worked for companies they admired.  For Katelyn Hill (below), here's what happened:

Katelyn Hill recently graduated from Abilene Christian University with a degree in Electronic Media. She loves television and movies and hopes to work in the entertainment industry, so she targeted the Walt Disney Company with her Facebook advertising campaign. Her ad received 685 clicks, which garnered 21 e-mails and 4 Facebook messages. She was offered one job interview, but wasn’t quite qualified for the position, so she declined. She also had several e-mails from individuals who offered to forward her resume to their supervisors. Many others offered her general advice on finding a job with Disney or commented on how creative they thought her ad campaign was.

I think this is a brilliant idea.  It isn't a reach to take this approach and target attorneys and staff at specific firms you'd like to work for. 

It could (though your malpractice carrier may disagree) also work for lawyers targeting specific clients or types of work as well.

One Thousand Dollars an Hour is Dumb.

If you must compete on price, here's a McDonald's billboard that might give your marketing people some inspiration:


Found on Billboardom.  Full Story Here.

A Social Media What-To-Do

Lots of folks are talking about using Social Media for business, including me. When I speak to lawyers, after the "What the heck is ..." questions come the "How much time will this take me?" ones. Last week, my friend Chris Brogan published his 19 Presence Management Chores You COULD Do Every Day post on his fantastic blog. In it, he shares 19 "chores" one could do every day (or at least every week) to keep one's online presence alive and kicking on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Blogs.

Here are his LinkedIn tips:

11. Enter any recent business cards to invite them to LinkedIn (if you’re growing your network).
12. Drop into Q&A and see if you can volunteer 2-3 answers.
13. Provide 1 recommendation every few days for people you can honestly and fully recommend.
14. Add any relevant slide decks to the Slideshare app there, or books to the Amazon bookshelf.

Nobody knows this growing world of "Presence Management" better than Chris, and I'd highly recommend you not only read his full post, but add some (or all) of his suggested "to-do's" to your list.

A Legal Blogging Roundtable

Last month, I participated in a legal blogging roundtable for the Bar Association of Metropolitan St. Louis that was published in their subscription-only newsletter.  My partners in crime were Dennis Kennedy (DennisKennedy.Blog), George Lenard (George's Employment Blawg), and Evan Schaeffer (Trial Practice Tips and The Legal Underground).  Together, we have combined for more than 20 years of blogging experience.

Dennis took our contributions and republished them to his blog as A Blogging Guide for St. Louis (and Other) Lawyers (and Others).  Here's one of our takes on the future of blogging:

Matt Homann: I think we'll see the continued adoption of blogs by legal professionals as much by choice as necessity. The next generation of law firm clients have lived their entire lives online, interact with Twitter and Facebook constantly, and read blogs everyday. They may have never used the Yellow Pages, and instead look to the web before making any major purchasing decision. They'll expect a robust online presence from the professionals they hire, and a blog is one of the easiest and most effective ways to build that presence.

George Lenard: Integration with the surviving remnants of mainstream media into enriched, customized streams of information in manageable chunks for busy readers, plus continuing contributions to the wealth of information available to web users through ever-more-sophisticated search technologies. I was recently told by a web-content distribution company that my posts now have the potential of appearing in a news stream on the Wall Street Journal's law pages amidst conventional sources such as the ABA Journal, if they match the WSJ search criteria, with no distinction in appearance that would suggest that my content is in any way inferior or less professional than that written by professional journalists.

Evan Schaeffer: I don't have any predictions about the future of blogging. If you think of blogging as merely a means of publishing one's writing, which it is, you don't have to be too worried about the future. Get into the habit of writing, and if you like it, you can always migrate to the next technological platform, if and when there is one.

Dennis Kennedy: Among bloggers, Twitter and microblogging is all the rage. That will continue to affect blogging, but blogging still has great potential, especially to cover niche topics. I remain bullish on blogging. As for predicting the future, I still like what Ernest "Ernie the Attorney" Svenson said in an article on the future of blogging from four years ago in Law Practice Magazine: "Perhaps the biggest question that remains is: How quickly will law firms move to develop blogs? It depends on a lot of internal and external factors. But the clock is certainly ticking. For some firms that sound is just loud and annoying, while for others it is stirring and prompting them to act. So when will your firm create a blog? Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick . . . ."

Meet Me in Missouri

I'm headed down to Missouri's Lake of the Ozarks this week for the Missouri Solo and Small Firm Conference to speak about marketing, innovation, technology and the web.  There will be over 900 lawyers there this year -- which makes it the largest solo and small firm conference in the country.

If you'll be there, be certain to say hello.  If you can't make it, I'll be covering as much as I can on Twitter and will be using the hashtag #mossfc