How would you like to pick up 20 new clients in 2009 with no legal marketing cost whatsoever?

Sounds pretty good, huh?

Well, it’s possible.  All you have to do is leverage the power of social media.

And, in this week’s Law Business Secrets e-newsletter, I’m walking you step by step down the road to doing just that. Take the first step today.

What is social media?

For the purpose of bringing you business, think of it as an online chamber of commerce that has 24/7 networking meetings where you can meet your perfect clients.

My entertainment lawyer picked up 20 new clients, including me, last year from Twitter.

Would you like to do that too?

You can!

The first step is to get on Twitter.

If you aren’t there already, it’s super easy.

Just go to: Twitter and sign up for an account.

Once you are signed up (or if you already are), be sure to follow me and let me know you are following me.

You do that by going to Twitter/AlexisNeely and clicking the button that says Follow.

Once you are following me, drop me a note by typing “@alexisneely I’m on Twitter from your Law Business Secrets newsletter” into the What Are You Doing window.

Now what?

I’ll send you further instructions about how to get the most out of your Twitter experience through Twitter once I know you are there.

*Here’s one major tip* – when you sign up for Twitter,use your full name, first and last, if it’s not taken.

That will make it WAY easier for people to find you, which is what you want.

Ok, that’s all you have to do to get started.

It’s easy, it’s free, there’s no excuses.

Go do it.

PS – what are you waiting for? Go sign up for Twitter now and if you are already signed up, let me know you are there so I can be sure to send you personal TweetTips and help you build your influence in the Twittersphere.

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About the Law Business Revolution

The Law Business Revolution is a law firm marketing and training organization focused on helping attorneys attract quality clients, start and grow productive law firms, systematize their businesses and ultimately help lawyers attain more time and greater resources than ever before.

Training through the Law Business Revolution includes (but is not limited to), private and group coaching led by professionals that surpassed the 7-figure mark in their own firms and businesses, client engagement strategies, client attraction strategies, educational, relationship-based marketing techniques designed to get results, lead generation training, campaigns for consumers, referrals and prospects and systematizing a firm to run on autopilot.

Licensed attorneys are welcome to download over $22,500 of free practice building resources courtesy of the Law Business Revolution at http://www.lawbusinessrevolution.com .

I recently closed my million dollar law firm so I could focus my attention on coaching and a fellow attorney on Twitter (@scottgreenfield) asked why.

I figured if one person had this question, many others might as well. And the answer is instructive on many levels.

So, rather than try to fit the answer into a 140 character Tweet, I thought I’d give it the length the answer deserves.

Was I Crazy to Close My Law Firm?

And believe me, this is a question that I have gone over and over in my mind for quite some time now. I did not make the decision to close my law firm lightly. My boyfriend (@davedee) repeatedly questioned my decision.

He would say to me “Alexis, are you sure you don’t want to just keep being a lawyer and focus on the growth of your firm? You could easily have a $2mm per year firm working 2-3 days per week. Are you really sure?”

He was right. I could have stayed a lawyer, had a great name in my community, been working a few days per week and had a nice, easy life.

Over the last few weeks, as I’ve actually been going through the process of closing my firm, I’ve questioned my sanity more than a few times in making the decision I did. Especially as the Universe has thrown some pretty major tests my way.

The week after I announced my firm closing I spoke at an event I had agreed to speak at months ago and 23 people requested appointments and several begged me to be their lawyer. With my engagement history and average fee, I was easily turning down $100,000 by saying no.

So, why? Well, here’s the long answer …

I Almost Got Trapped By the Golden Handcuffs Once

Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to represent the underdog. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to help families.

Then, I got to law school at Georgetown, racked up close to $100,000 of law school debt, graduated first in my law school class, got married and pregnant and starting salaries were $135,000 per year.

The lure of the 6-figure salary was just too much to pass up and I convinced myself that I could join a big law firm and still make a difference and help families by going into estate planning.

Pretty quickly, I could tell I wasn’t going to stay long-term. I didn’t feel as if I was really helping anyone. Everything was so transactional.

Billing my time in 6 minute increments, working on estate plans for people who didn’t really seem to care what we were doing for them. And worst of all, I knew the plans we were putting in place were likely to fail by the time our clients needed them to work because we weren’t proactively keeping them up to date and we weren’t ensuring the assets were titled in the right way.

I Swore I Would Never Be THAT Kind of Lawyer

When I was in law school, my father-in-law had died. He’d spent a few thousand dollars on an estate plan and at the end of his life, that plan failed because his assets were not owned in the right way and the plan had never been updated. I thought for sure his lawyer must have committed malpractice. Then, I got to the big law firm and found out it wasn’t malpractice, it was common practice.

Despite the big paycheck and the great people I worked with, I decided to leave after only three years in practice and open up my own law firm.

That was August of 2003. I had just given birth to my second child that March, my husband was a stay at home dad and while I was scared to death, I decided to risk it all because in my heart I knew it would never get any easier to leave the security of the big law firm and the big paycheck.

So, I left.

I Started My Own Firm And Discovered the Traditional Business Model Was Broken

Very quickly, I discovered the traditional business model of the solo and small firm lawyer was broken. To begin with, there was no system for me to follow. I had to reinvent the wheel, making everything up as I went along.

I hired a well known law practice management coach to guide me through the transition and he was insistent that I set things up under the traditional/old school model that I knew was flawed. When I told him some of my radical ideas, he told me I’d fail. I fired him. (I gave this same coach a second chance a few years later and hired him to advise me on the sale of my practice when I held a contest to sell my law firm and suddenly had 25 potential buyers.  His guidance actually jettisonsed the sale.)

I was struggling along and learning from the leaders in the estate planning industry about how to be successful, but when I looked behind the scenes at their successful businesses what I saw was shocking. They were trapped in their businesses with no way out. Most of the time, they were working 10-12 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. They had no recurring revenue, no exit strategies, huge overhead and in many cases they were churning out documents that would very likely fail when their clients needed them. More often than not, they were secretly miserable. This was not the life for me.

I knew there had to be a better way.

I Finally Realized I’d Have to Look Outside the Legal Industry For Answers

So, I looked outside the legal industry for answers. Over a two year period, I gave myself a masters in entrepreneurship by studying teachers like Dan Kennedy, Michael Gerber, Richard Branson, and Mark Cuban. Through them, I learned some very important lessons about marketing and systems and mindset and motivation.

I learned how to attract my ideal clients, how to engage them nearly 100% of the time, how to create a predictable system to service the clients and how to keep them clients for life. And, I learned how to run my office in a streamlined fashion.

With What I Learned, I Built a Million Dollar Law Business

In 2006, my law business generated just over $1,000,000 of revenue. In 2007, we did it again, but that year I did it while only going into my law office two (2) days per week and I began teaching other lawyers how to do what I had done. In 2008, I sold my law firm.

Unfortunately, the man I sold it to was trying to run both my law firm and his and ultimately, he wasn’t able to keep up with the demands of two busy firms. When he began to fall behind on the processes, systems and marketing that I had set up to keep the firm successful, we jointly made the difficult decision to close the firm.

I could have jumped right back in to seeing clients. Those 23 people who requested appointments when I presented in early January would have resulted in a $100,000 month to start off the year, putting me right back on track without missing a beat.

But, I made a different choice because my purpose in life is not congruent with continuing to own and operate a solo/small firm shop no matter how lucrative or easy it was.

In fact, the entire time I was a practicing lawyer, first at the big firm and then in my own firm, in the back of my mind there was always a piece of me that wondered how being a lawyer fit in with my life purpose.

I felt called to impact the lives of millions of people. I felt an inner calling to help other lawyers in a tremendous way and while I loved serving my clients, it felt like something integral was missing.

Now, With What I Learned, I Am Revolutionizing the Legal World

Today, I am aware that I became a lawyer and built my law firm and had so much success so rapidly so that I could effect change on a massive scale by changing the way lawyers think, act and operate and by changing the way the American public thinks about lawyers.

I feel this is a gift from God and to do anything less than I am doing now would be doing a disservice to the world.

I thought long and hard about whether I could carry out my calling and operate my law firm. It was hard to give up all that money. And I loved my clients tremendously.

But, what I know is that I will be able to make a much bigger difference if I focus my attention on teaching other lawyers what I’ve learned over the past 5 years. Ultimately, the money I’ve given up by closing the law firm will return to me one-hundred fold in terms of what I am able to create for lawyers and the American people who deserve to have affordable access to a lawyer who cares about them, will guide them throughout every aspect of their life and be there for their family when they can’t be.

My New Business Model For the Practice of Law is Creating a
Making a Huge Difference For Lawyers and Their Clients

Today, we have 60 lawyers across the United States who have stepped forward and said YES, I am choosing a different way for my life, my business and my clients.

What’s exciting is this is only the beginning.

They are experiencing tremendous success. In the middle of one of the worst economic crises in history, their businesses are thriving. Just one example is Nicole Newman who engaged 11 brand new clients at an average fee of $4,000 in February of 2009. And that was only one of the sources of revenue in her law business. She’s got recurring revenue from an ongoing membership program, follow on work from existing clients and a sideline revenue stream helping clients with loan modifications. She’ll be adding additional revenue streams in as we provide her with more and more plug and play systems for her law firm.

We are constantly in development of new opportunities and joint venture relationships for our Personal Family Lawyers.

One of the things I learned from Dan Kennedy is 1 is the unluckiest number for any business owner. 1 revenue stream, 1 source of clients, 1 main client. Bad news. Especially in an economy like this.

Recurring Revenue, Multiple Revenue Streams, & Building Thriving Businesses

I feel so badly for those lawyers who bet their whole business on focusing on the uber-rich families who need estate tax planning. Sure, the fees from a case like that can range from $25,000 to $100,000, but very few people need estate tax planning today.

My heart breaks for the lawyers who never learned how to generate new business on their own, instead relying on insurance agents and financial advisors for their bread and butter. Many of those lawyers are going hungry today. Referrals are drying up as the bottom falls out of the stock market.

Clients want and deserve more than document-centric lawyers who offer little more than Legal Zoom.  They want a lawyer who will help them make legal and financial decisions at every life stge and give them the tools to pass on more than just their money.  They want a lawyer for life.

Sure, I could continue to run my law firm and thrive in my community. But, to do that would be to fail my fellow lawyers who deserve to know the system for thriving too without having to reinvent the wheel on their own. And it would be to fail the American public that deserves more than is available to them right now.

Our Proven Systems Give Lawyers Tools To Reach and Serve Clients Who Need Them

Over the next several months, we are showing the Personal Family Lawyers how to add even more sideline revenue streams to their businesses  by giving them systems for reaching and serving families with special needs, elderly clients who may qualify for unclaimed VA benefits, parents whose children need to qualify for financial aid and a system reaching and for serving business owners who are more than ever seeking out asset protection strategies. Each one of these sideline sources of business and revenue for them have been tested and proven by other Personal Family Lawyers in our network.

Every single one of these demographics – parents of children with special needs, veterans, parents with college age kids, and business owners – each one of these families, deserves affordable access to lawyers who will do things the right way with systems in place to make sure that the planning gets completed, the questions get answered, the assets get owned properly, the benefits get qualified for, the businesses get protected.

Clients Want Deserve Affordable Access to a Lawyer for Life

These families do not want Pre-Paid Legal Services. They want their own personal lawyer who knows them, cares about them, communicates with them regularly and will be there for them so they never have to sign a legal document (contract, deed, loan documents, prenuptial agreement) without it being reviewed again. They want a lawyer who is going to be there for their family when they can’t be. They don’t want to pay hourly fees.

They want a Personal Family Lawyer®.

So, that’s why I gave up my million dollar law firm.

I wrote a 36-page manifesto about the lessons I learned during the 5 years I built my law firm into a million dollar law business. You can join the revolution and get the Manifesto here: http://budurl.com/LawRev

It’s official.  Our economy is in a recession and so is the law industry.  And, there’s no question that it’s hitting law firms where it hurts.  The question will be how the impact is felt in your law firm and on your career.

If you are a solo or small firm lawyer, you have a lot of control over that, but only if you don’t allow the fear to put you into paralysis and instead get out there and take action now.

Here are four things you can do immediately to help ensure that your fortune is increased during this recession and not decimated as many of your competitors will be:

1.  Market Yourself Effectively & Efficiently

Now is the time to pick up your marketing in a big, bad kind of way.  While most of your competitors will be pulling back, you can double your marketing ROI by doing more.

The key though is to make your marketing consistent and diverse.

Consistent means you are doing the same set of things each and every month, without fail.

Diverse means that you are doing more than one thing.  Hopefully a lot more.

It means you’re using direct mail, advertising, and seminars to generate leads.  Plus, you’ve got a referral strategy in place that doesn’t involve you wasting time with pointless networking luncheons.  You aren’t relying on any one thing to bring in a more than 2-3 new clients per month, but instead a handful of things to bring in 2-3 clients each per month.

2.  Engage More Prospects at Higher Fees

If you can increase your engagement rate so that nearly 100% of the people who come into meet with you end up engaging your firm at higher fees, you will see a huge impact on your growth in the direction you want things to go.

I know it seems counter-intuitive to talk about raising your fees during a time when everyone’s worried about money.  But, that’s always been one of the secrets to my success.  Do the opposite of what everyone else is doing.

By raising your fees, you will actually become more in demand and you’ll need to see fewer clients and be able to provide more service to your clients.

Now, the key is that you’ve got to be engaging the prospects who call your office.  The key to that is to make sure that your intake staff is using a proven script designed to get the prospects into the office and that you are using a script that ensures you are engaging nearly 100% of the people who come in.

If you aren’t engaging nearly 100% of the people who make it into your office or if you are dealing with a boatload of cancellations each month, there is a solution.  We’ve got a whole system that teaches client engagement, check it out risk-free at www.clientengagementsystem.com.

3.  Focus Your Business On an Underserved Niche

No matter what your practice area is, you should consider focusing on a niche for all of your marketing efforts.  All of the best and brightest marketing gurus out there say that the more you can laser focus your marketing to a small subset of people, the more successful you will be.

In most cases, lawyers make the mistake of doing what all of their colleagues are doing and what happens is you begin to see a lot of activity in certain niche demographics and very little in others.

Here’s an example from the estate planning area, which you can extrapolate out into whichever practice area you are working in.

The vast majority of estate planning lawyers are either marketing to elderly people, the ultra-wealthy, or not niching their marketing at all.  This leads to a very crowded marketplace with most lawyers appearing exactly like the guy next door and not very much for prospects to differentiate one from the other except on price.

That’s how commodities are created.

I took a different track when I built my practice from scratch 5 years ago.

I niched my marketing and focused almost entirely on reaching families with young children, an extremely underserved market who is in need of estate planning services.

Here’s what was so interesting.  Once I committed to focus my marketing efforts on the niche of reaching young families, I began to attract all sorts of other prospects outside of my niche, including elderly folks and the uber-rich.

4.  Add On a Lucrative Practice Area

Some practice areas are suffering right now, while others are thriving.  Bankruptcies are on the rise, I’m sure divorces will be increasing as families crumble under financial pressures.  If you are in a practice area that is not currently thriving, consider branching out into something complementary that may be able to serve your already existing client base.

Estate planning is one of the best practice areas to add on to your practice because it’s easy to learn and everyone you know needs it, no matter what the economy is like.  The one thing you can’t avoid is death and taxes, but through a lifetime relationship with your estate planning lawyer, you can make both of them a lot less scary.

Here’s the key though, if you are going to add on a complementary practice area, make sure that you don’t delude yourself into thinking that this is going to save your business if you are blaming the slow down of your current business on the economy, but you aren’t marketing and haven’t already done all you can to expand your existing business.  Make sure you have a marketing plan in place to get the word out about your new offerings and how they can benefit your clients.

And, be sure that the practice area you are adding on to your business is easy to learn, systematizable, and has a proven system you can follow for maximum success as quickly as possible.

If you want to consider adding estate planning on as a complement to your already successful law practice, contact us by email at support@familywealthmatters.com as we have a proven, turn-key system that will allow you to quickly and easily get up and running to meet the estate planning needs of your existing clients and bring in a whole new base of fresh clients.

The best part about the estate planning practice area is that we teach you how to become your client’s primary, trusted advisor helping them to make a lifetime of smart financial and legal decisions.  It’ll help you get back to the reason you became a lawyer in the first place.

The long and the short of it is that if you are innovative, focused and creative, this recession can be just the opportunity you need to take your business to a whole new level of efficiency, effectiveness and profitability.  Things are changing anyway, why not make this an opportunity to become the lawyer you’ve always wanted to be?

Image courtesy of Flickr

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About the Law Business Revolution

The Law Business Revolution is a law firm marketing and training organization focused on helping attorneys attract quality clients, start and grow productive law firms, systematize their businesses and ultimately help lawyers attain more time and greater resources than ever before.

Training through the Law Business Revolution includes (but is not limited to), private and group coaching led by professionals that surpassed the 7-figure mark in their own firms and businesses, client engagement strategies, client attraction strategies, educational, relationship-based marketing techniques designed to get results, lead generation training, campaigns for consumers, referrals and prospects and systematizing a firm to run on autopilot.

Licensed attorneys are welcome to download over $22,500 of free practice building resources courtesy of the Law Business Revolution at http://www.lawbusinessrevolution.com .

Right now is the perfect time to plan your legal marketing out for the New Year. If you wait, you are already behind the 8-ball. So make sure you block off time this month to create your action strategy for 2010 and beyond.  More importantly than all of the strategy and planning though is your day to day actions.

Are you acting like a trusted advisor or just paying lip service to it? Where’s the relationship in your relationship with your clients?

Here are the things you must be doing to fulfill on the promise and expectation of what your clients want:

1. No hourly billings and no surprise billings. Everything must be agreed to in advance and invoices must be expected.

2. Responsive team approach. When clients call, they must be able to get guidance from someone on your team. When they are waiting for a call back, that call back must come quickly even if it’s just to say, I don’t have an answer for you yet, I’ll call you back in two days.

3. You must ensure their assets are titled properly and their plan stays up to date.

4. You should have in place a membership program, but only if you are able to fulfill on the promise of membership with regular reviews and timely response to clients with needs.

5. You must help them pass on more than just their money. This is what it means to be a Personal Family Lawyer®, by the way.

If you are not there yet, make sure your 2010 planning session includes incorporating the components of fulfilling on your promise. If you don’t, you can market all you want and you can engage lots of clients, but you will be spinning your wheels and frustrated when your business is stagnant and doesn’t feel as if it’s moving anywhere.

I want the opposite for you. I want to see you create a business that is full of life energy, that grows organically with the help of your raving fans who are loyal to you and send all of their friends and family, a business that you can retire from or sell one day.

To do that, you must fulfill on your relationship promise.

Commit to yourself to make 2010 the year it all happens!

About the Law Business Revolution

The Law Business Revolution is a law firm marketing and training organization focused on helping attorneys attract quality clients, start and manage productive law firms, systematize their businesses and ultimately help lawyers attain more time and greater resources than ever before.

Training through the Law Business Revolution includes (but is not limited to), private and group coaching led by professionals that surpassed the 7-figure mark in their own firms and businesses, client engagement strategies, client attraction strategies, educational, relationship-based marketing techniques designed to get results, lead generation training, campaigns for consumers, referrals and prospects and systematizing a firm to run on autopilot.

Licensed attorneys are welcome to download over $22,500 of free practice building resources courtesy of the Law Business Revolution at http://www.lawbusinessrevolution.com .

Here we are providing our clients with top notch professional service and yet we ourselves are not making the most of our own professional advisors.

Is it because we think we don’t need them?

For the first few years I was out on my own, I thought I could handle everything myself. I used my CPA to file my taxes and that was it.

Big mistake!

As a result of that error, I ended up with an unexpected and unplanned for 6-figure tax bill in 2007. Yes, it meant 2006 was a great year, but coming up with over $100,000 to pay my taxes was not pretty. And, it meant that I left a lot of opportunities to save taxes on the table.

For example, I just met with my CPA for my October tax strategy meeting and this year, I’ll be putting $25,000 into my own 401(k) because by doing so, I drop my tax liability after payment of all my estimates down to zero.

That’s in contrast to the $7,000 or so I was going to owe if I didn’t contribute to the 401(k).

If I waited until February or March to meet with my CPA just so he could prepare my taxes, I’d have missed that opportunity.

Don’t be one of the cobbler’s kids. Call your CPA and schedule your own tax strategy session right now before anymore time for planning gets away and take the opportunity to remind your clients to do this too… You can provide so much value to your clients, stay at the top of their mind and be the lawyer they turn to next time they or a friend have a need, just by sending out an email or a newsletter with this kind of great advice that all business
owners need.

I went to law school because I was a great problem solver, knew I wanted to help people and loved being in a position of power and control.

Oh, and of course, I went to law school because I wanted to make a lot of money!

When I graduated and went to work in the biglaw firm and even after starting my own law firm, I found myself pushing paper, not feeling as if I was helping anyone and with very little power over anything … at the beck and call of generally ungrateful and demanding clients.

And, after being around my business owner clients and seeing what it meant to make money, I quickly saw that being a lawyer was unlikely to get me anywhere near the big leagues financially, at least not under the traditional legal model.

Fortunately, I found the secret to getting back to being the lawyer I went to law school to become.  A lawyer who truly makes a difference in my client’s lives, has a continuing stream of revenue that keeps pumping in even when I go on vacation and a real business that I am now in the position to sell.

Imagine if you could be a specialist in your primary practice area while at the same time getting compensated on an ongoing basis to guide your clients to answers about all the legal questions they have – issues that are mystifying to them but exceedingly simple to you.

What would it feel like to be the trusted counselor your clients turned to the way it used to be when regular people consulted their personal lawyer before making important decisions.  What if we could go back to the time when lawyers didn’t have to bill for every phone call in six minute increments.  What if you could turn the traditional and broken law business model on its head and re-connect to everything wonderful about the practice of law again?

The good news?  You can! It merely requires you to step outside the box and think differently about everything you’ve learned about being a lawyer and owning a law practice.