Great Minds Think Alike
I firmly believe that — if they’re good — you can use your writing skills to attract clients.
Jim Hasset, author of the Legal Business Development blog, seems to agree:
” . . . I often talk to lawyers who are writing articles or books in their marketing time. As a man who spends a lot of time writing this blog and many other things, I obviously think that writing can be a good way to increase visibility. But there are several important caveats. First of all, writing is way too much fun for some of us, and it’s easy to write things that do not serve the central marketing purpose. Second, by itself publication is unlikely to bring in new business.
To be an effective marketing tactic, writing must be used to build relationships, one person at a time. (One example: Send copies of your article to key contacts, each with a short written note.) Third and most important: you must consider what else you could be doing with that time. If an article takes ten hours to write, what else could you do with those ten marketing hours? Would you get more results with current clients, or by strengthening relationships with people you already know?”
Discussing current conditions, Hasset recently wrote:
Do you want to guess how many of the lawyers who lost their positions were rainmakers with their own solid books of business? Nobody knows for sure, but my guess is zero, not a single one. Layoffs affect the lawyers who do legal work, not the rainmakers who bring in the work.
