I’m Jim Hart, creator of Legal Marketing Made Easy. Whether you are just starting out on your journey of building a law practice, or you are looking to get more clients for, (and control over) your law practice, Legal Marketing Made Easy was created with you in mind. In this page, I’ve tried to condense all the really important things that you need to know to get your firm going – quickly and confidently, and so that you can get that phone ringing in no time!
Feel free to just read from top to bottom, or click on the links below to find the information that is most relevant to you on this page:
- How to Start a Law Firm Blog
- Mindset Issues
- An overview of the process
- Resources I can’t do without
- FREE E-book and six-part marketing crash course
- First things you need to do
In addition, I would love it if you would head over to my survey page and answer some quick questions about you and what you are looking for from Legal Marketing Made Easy. This will help me to continue to provide excellent and valuable, free content to my readers.
One other thing that I highly recommend – if you haven’t yet listened to my Podcast, I strongly urge you to head on over to iTunes and subscribe to the Legal Marketing Made Easy Podcast. I publish a new episode each week, and it is one of the best and easiest ways to stay on track with your practice building efforts.
Mindset 101: The Fundamentals
In order to take control of your legal practice and turn it into a business, you must begin by understanding that there is a fundamental difference between practicing law as an employee of a law firm, and running and operating your own law practice. When you leave the paycheck behind and open up your own law practice, you have become a business owner – and need to begin operating your law practice accordingly.
Here are several resources you should review which will help you get your head around the idea that you are now (or soon will be) a business owner (who just happens to be a lawyer).
An Overview of the Legal Marketing Made Easy Process
Most legal marketing experts you talk to will preach referrals, referrals, referrals all day long. When I first started out I hired a marketing coach and that is what they told me as well. Unfortunately, what I quickly found out was that lots of the people who were in the best position to refer me quality clients either a) didn’t trust me because I was a new attorney; or b) already had lawyers that they trusted to refer cases to.
Now, part of this could have been my mindset at the time, and probably was, but I decided that I had to originate my own cases and not rely on other professionals to refer me work. So I somewhat flipped the model on its head – I focused on building a web presence first (which positioned me as authority to both potential clients AND potential referral sources), and then focused on building my referral networks.
As a result, the centralized theme for Legal Marketing Made Easy is to build your online presence first – and show you what you need to do to do that. I go into great detail on how to do this in the following two posts:
- Using Pay-per-click ads to build a list of raving fans – Podcast
- Using Infusionsoft in your law practice
Resources I can’t live without
I consider my law practice to be pretty “cutting edge” when it comes to technology, and have created an entire list of resources that I use on my resources page. However, there are six resources that I couldn’t live without, and here they are:
- Email Marketing: Infusionsoft (or Aweber)
- List Building: Optin Skin
- Lead Attraction: LeadPages
- Virtual Receptionist: Call Ruby
- Case Management: MyCase
- Document Management/Storage: Box.com
FREE Report and Legal Marketing Crash Course
So you may be thinking to yourself right now, this is great, but what if I need some extra attention and motivation to keep me on track? I’ve got an answer for that as well. I’ve put together a free report that outlines 10 things you must do before you start a law practice, as well as a six-part legal marketing crash course. All you need to do is sign up in the box below.
Once you have signed up, you will be asked to confirm your email address. Next you will immediately receive the free report via email. Then, over the course of the next 6 weeks, I will send you a weekly email detailing 6 different marketing mistakes that I see many lawyers make in their law practice – and how you can avoid these mistakes in your practice.
Additional Resources and Assistance
Here are some links to my most popular blog posts since I started Legal Marketing Made Easy. You may want to start with these.
- A comparison of case management programs (Rocket Matter vs. MyCase)
- Using Sex in your Legal Marketing?
- How to attract and retain more clients without selling
- Why I love Infusionsoft in my law practice
- What is the goal of your law firm website?
Then, feel free to head over to my Facebook page and “Like” me there. You may also want to follow me on Twitter or Google +.
If you’ve consumed all this and are still looking for more information, I’m in the process of developing a membership only, advanced training program. Feel free to head to my Academy page, where you can sign up to receive free updates and special discounts leading up to my estimated launch date in June 2014.