The Practice

New source for holiday cards

Want some custom holiday cards to send out this year? Check out Redbean Design. Melissa over there is custom designing holiday cards for law firms. And the best part? 15% discount if you mention my name.

Here is a bit about Redbean:

Redbean Design is an award-winning San Francisco based design firm with aspirations of delighting correspondence connoisseurs worldwide.

Driven by the notion that good design spans all mediums, our work includes print, web, surface, packaging, product, identity and textile design.

We published our first holiday cards three years ago, with the goal of offering a fresh perspective and stylish, premium quality alternative to card buyers, at an affordable price. We sold out within just a few weeks, and decided to make the holiday cards an annual project.

Make sure to put my name (Jonathan Stein) in the notes field to get your discount.

Great new blog

I like outside the box thinking. Outside the box marketing works. Outside the box soccer. Outside the box anything.

Well, here is an outside the box blog from an attorney. New York attorney Richard Jaffe has a new blog. It is a very good read. I highly recommend you take a look.

Free Virtual Office for Fire Victims

I just posted this on my PI blog. I don't usually just link between blogs, but this information needs to get out there.

If you are affected, I wish you the best. Please let us know what we can do to help.

San Diego and Los Angeles Wildfires

I just posted on my PI blog about the San Diego and LA fires. You can read my post here.

Short and simple: If you can help out, please let me know. We should help these people when we can and we can this time.

How friendly is your website?

Lisa Solomon, famous for Question of Law and The Billable Hour, sent me this website that will help you figure out how friendly your website is.

The Customer Focus Calculator tells you how consumer oriented your website is. From their website:

As proud as you may be of your company and your product or service, most customers only care about how well you can help them meet their wants and needs. If you want more of them to buy, your focus has to be on your customer. How do you communicate that to them? With the words you use on your site. Are you talking mostly about them and their needs or are you talking mostly about yourself?

To help you answer that question, we've developed a unique and free analysis tool that counts certain words on your site that are key indicators of whether your focus is on the customer or not. As you use it, keep in mind this is nothing more than a handy, but rough guide that will help you focus on something important. There are lots of variables and also remember there are no shortcuts to writing great copy.

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From me, again: I checked this out. Interestingly, my website is more focused on the customer than my blogs. And some pages turned out better than others. No surprise that my "About You" page was the most customer focused.

Give it a shot. It really is a useful tool.

Top 25 + 1 more! (Plus some books)

I can't believe I left AccessLaw off my list. Thankfully, Julie Goren of Litigation By the Numbers reminded me.

By the way, if I were putting together a list of books you need, I would tell you that you need:

1. Litigation By the Numbers;
2. Rules of the Road;
3. Ball On Damages;
4. Ben Glass' Great Legal Marketing (not really a book, but reading materials).

Enjoy!

Secretaries, Oh My

Why am I not a big fan of legal secretaries? Because they get in the way. Oh, don't get me wrong. A good secretary is worth her weight in gold. The key word here, however, is good. And those are hard to find.

Not only are good legal secretaries hard to find, but a legal secretary can get in the way of communication. You see, if I want to invite someone to lunch, I pick up the phone and call. It is pretty easy. However, there are many attorneys, and I mean many, who tell their secretary to call.

Great, so you say you want to take me to lunch, but you can't spend the 5 minutes setting up the appointment yourself? You send someone else to do it. What does that say to me? It says - in loud words - "I want to talk to you, but not that badly."

If you must have a secretary, find a good one. And let her do him/her do his/her job. But do not let him/her get in the way of you doing your job and communicating with people. After all, attorneys are communicators!

Congrats to a Marketing Guru!

Ben Glass of Great Legal Marketing fame has been selected by the Information Marketing Association for inclusion in its new book, The Official Get Rich Guide to Information Marketing.

For those of you who do not know, Ben has created what is, in my opinion, the best legal marketing program for personal injury attorneys. But, don't stop reading if you are not a PI attorney. I have successfully used Ben's program to market my debt collection practice. Ben's program works.

Give it a peek and remember to congratulate Ben on this accomplishment!

Top 25 + 1

Okay, in my research I missed one product. Now, I could debate why I missed it: not enough marketing, not marketing to the right groups, it slipped through the cracks or I wasn't looking for it. But, alas, I missed it.

The Daily Case Report is a website you want to see. These guys, two attorneys in San Jose, CA give updates on California slip opinions - via video! And you can get MCLE credit for it. How cool is that? From them:

Daily RSS feed announces all new Slip Opinions.  Subscribers also get Slip opinion alerts by email that they can personalize to notify them only of new cases in the areas of law that they practice.  And, best of all, when you watch 15 minute video programs discussing the new cases, you earn MCLE credit. If you find something interesting only once every 2 and a half weeks, you can easily earn all the MCLE you need, just by keeping current on the cases that matter to your practice.

Hey, its free and it looks pretty cool. Give this a spin and let me know your thoughts. I like it!

My top 25

No, I am not going to give you my top 25 college football teams this year. (Although, I do think USC should still be #1 and LSU #2, but I also don't think they should release a preseason top 25 since no one knows how good anyone will be until they play a game. But, that is for another post.)

I just got back from Anaheim and the California State Bar annual meeting. I gave a CLE program on technology and the law firm. In doing so, I prepared a list of 25 programs you should have for your firm. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Audacity
2. Mirra Personal Server
3. Adobe Acrobat Pro 8.0
4. Webex
5. ProDoc
6. Basecamp
7. Verizon EVDO
8. Paperport Pro
9. Logmein.com or Gotomypc.com or gotomeeting.com
10. Dragon 9.0
11. Skype
12. DepoSmart
13. Scanner
14. Dual monitors
15. Listserves
16. Etran manager from RealLegal
17. Snagit
18. Copernic Desktop
19. Google earth, Myspace, Friendster, Google, Zillow
20. Cybersecretary (www.speakwrite.com)
21. Accurint
22. TimeMap and TextMap
23. Stamps.com
24. Ureach/efax
25. Activewords

Let me know what you think is missing. But, this list is what I think you need, after spending quite a bit of time last week researching this.