Being a great trial lawyer and being a great business person do not necessarily go hand in hand. Over the weekend at the AAJ Winter Convention in Phoenix, I sat down and spoke with my friend Marc Stern, Vice President of Business Development for Sokolove Law. As we discussed marketing in general, he mentioned to me how surprised he is when he discusses ROI with trial lawyers and they respond with: what is ROI? For the trial lawyers reading this post and asking the same question, ROI is Return On Investment. ROI is something that every trial lawyer who is marketing and advertising their services should be familiar with. How else are we to know whether we are spending marketing and advertising dollars wisely? I mention this only to illustrate the point that trial lawyers need to pay attention their business, as well as their cases so that we do not become our own worst enemies by failing to properly manage the funds that we work so hard to bring into the firm. Along these lines, I am planning a series of future articles discussing several aspects of “the business of being a trial lawyer.” Look for future articles here or follow the link posted on the Lawyerology! Blog’s Twitter feed @lawyerology.
One tip I will offer today is that trial lawyers carrying a large caseload, without sufficient time to dedicate to business issues, should think about hiring others to do so. Here at Sullivan, Morgan & Chronic LLC, we have several people dedicated full time to jobs that do not exclusively include active case work, but do include marketing, advertising and other functions. My wife, Bianca Sullivan who has an MBA and a JD manages the business operations of the office. Shaun Bender, an IT professional from Promovi Solutions Group, manages the firm’s network, hardware, software, blog back-end, website back-end and is a frequent contributor to any discussion involving Internet marketing and advertising. The firm’s Director of Information Management, Ford Inbody, in addition to managing all records at the firm, is a frequent contributor to marketing and social media decision making. Finally, the firm recently began discussions with local social media, web development and API gurus David Snodgrass (@webdevgeek) and Shannon Schlappi (@dramclub) from Locker Partner about how social media can be utilized to benefit the firm. The moral of the story is that, as much as we all wish that it did not have to be this way, there is more to being a trial lawyer in today’s legal environment than just settling cases and winning trials. As trial lawyers, we all need to do a better job of managing the business side of our firms if we want to ensure longevity and prosperity in the information age.
