Category Archive for: Business Development

Moneyball and the Law: Understanding the market

Part 3 of a 5-part series By Debra Baker “I do not start with the numbers any more than a mechanic starts with a monkey wrench. I start with the game, with the things that I see there and the things that people say there. And I ask:Is it true? Can you validate it? Can…

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Moneyball and The Law: Measuring Art

Part 2 of a 5-part series By Debra Baker “Baseball was theater. But it could not be artful unless its performances could be properly understood. The meaning of these performances depended on the clarity of the statistics that measure them.” – Michael Lewis, Moneyball Like baseball, the legal profession is as much art as it…

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Moneyball and the Law

The first of a five-part series. By Debra Baker Competition for a share of the legal services market has never been greater. Most firms struggle to identify how best to use limited marketing and business development time and dollars. Too often firms use subjective criteria when making decisions. They do what they’ve always done without…

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Why Marketers Should Care About Legal Project Management

In legal knowledge management and IT circles, the concept of Legal Project Management as a discipline has been a hot topic for the last two years. In marketing circles, … not so much. Amidst client development programs, service offering launches and the support and evaluation of new business opportunities, few law firm marketers seem to…

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Evolving from “lawyer’s lawyer” to “client’s lawyer”

Reflections on the impact of the emerging Global 25: Part 3 The first time I heard the term, ‘lawyer’s lawyer’ was during an interview with a senior partner about what made his firm different. His response was that they were “lawyer’s lawyers.” He was referring to the reputation the firm’s lawyers held within the legal…

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Maybe lawyers should sell widgets

Reflections on the emerging Global 25: Part 2 Legal is a profession, not an industry. Law firms are different; They don’t sell widgets. These are the theorems I was first introduced to when I started covering law practice management for the ABA Journal after graduating from law school in 1998. I challenged the first when…

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Networking lessons from outside the legal profession

I recently started attending a networking group comprised largely of professional services executives. In talking with one of the founders of the organization, he noted that they’ve had a hard time keeping attorneys as active members. He personally invited about 25 different attorneys to participate. They attended a few events but slowly dropped even though the…

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Targeted Law Firm Marketing: Why One Size Does Not Fit All

“[INSERT LAW FIRM NAME] is a full-service law firm with market-leading strengths in the energy, financial services, real estate, technology, pharmaceutical, and [insert industry] sectors. Our multidisciplinary teams handle business transactions, M&A, intellectual property, corporate governance, complex litigation and anything else that could come your way. In other words, we do anything for anyone.”  …

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Life is a marathon, plan your business development activities accordingly

My husband ran the Boston Marathon on Monday. Even as a spectator, it was a pretty amazing experience. Steve finished with a PR of 2:50:26, placing him 646 overall out of 27,000 runners. He smiled the whole time he was running. Training for the race was time consuming. He qualified last October at the Chicago…

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Diving in

It was a good week at work. One of my clients launched a major business development initiative. Another finalized materials for a marketing campaign to promote a new service line. A third got through a tedious set of meetings in preparation for a CRM deployment. I even got my taxes done. All of these projects…

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