Dan's Blog Posts

In this new series, we’ll look at how attorneys can more effectively position and sell themselves, without making compromises that mar their reputation, professional self-esteem or bottom line.

There’s a subtle psychology surrounding what happens when your potential clients interact with your website and domain name for the first time. If they know your domain name, and type directly into their web browser, the first action that they take will literally be typing in your domain.

With so many attorneys wondering what the next best thing is for their marketing, sometimes it makes sense to get back to the basics. While there is a constant bombardment of noise telling attorneys the hundreds of things that they can buy, or do, to help build their...

The phone rings. It's an attorney. She's frustrated. She explains to me that her firm has invested a lot of money in their firm's website. Tens of thousands of dollars. "They're lucky," I think to myself. "I've seen much worse. Hundreds of thousands of dollars flushed...

The news is full of gloom and doom for law students. Job prospects suck. Pay sucks. Student loans suck. If you listen hard enough you might even conclude that finding a decent law job out of law school is like winning the lottery. And being a realist, you might resign...

According to Ray Kurzweil, director of engineering at Google, robots will reach human levels of intelligence by 2029. Since there is wide variability in intelligence in humans, it's a matter of degree. According to Gartner, robots are set to take over one-third of all...

The legal marketplace, like the practice of law, is nuanced. There is no survey, short list or expert who can say definitively what every potential new client of every law firm is looking for when they shop. In this post we will look briefly at some of the factors, in...

There is no better source of new clients for a law firm than referrals. All attorneys know this. But many law firms never get referrals because they don't do these simple things. Ask for referrals. As fellow lawyers. Ask friends. Ask clients and former clients. You...

Got my "eLegal" email newsletter from the Arizona State Bar Association today. Their "Eye on Ethics" feature caught my eye. The question presented is: Is block-billing unethical? The practice of block-billing, as defined in the blurb, is: Lumping together multiple...

August 2, 2020 update: Since this post was originally published the world has changed. The Covid-19 crisis has changed the legal marketing and client intake paradigm. In today's reality, it's axiomatic that attorneys need to become skilled at doing remote...

In 2014 I published a post that looked at the commoditization of attorneys which looked at ways companies are making money from both lawyers and consumers of legal services. In the post I point out ways in which those practices are making lawyers complicit in the...

The legal profession is being commoditized by businesses and the internet. Companies are finding new and innovative ways to play both ends of the equation, that is, to make money from both attorneys and consumers of legal services, as well as ways to insert themselves...