Michael Ferguson

At Clio Con (Clio’s Cloud Nine annual conference) a couple weeks ago, Seth Godin advised lawyers that they should be seeking the minimum viable audience in their business development efforts. Godin has made blogging a lynchpin in growing his name and reputation as a speaker and author. His almost twenty years of blogging on Seth’s Blog , a blog publication, separate and apart from his website, has made him a household name in the marketing field. Godin’s Clio discussion may as well have been directed to blogging lawyers. After all, it’s the blogging lawyers who get the opportunity to build a strong name and develop business in a niche more than other lawyers — and to do so much faster. Why a minimal viable audience? Read what Godin shared on his blog a couple years ago: “ Of course everyone wants to reach the maximum audience. To be seen by millions, to maximize return on investment, to have a huge impact. And so we fall all over ourselves to dumb it down, average it out, pleasi...

“Connecting lawyers with people, for good, since 2003,” feels like a much nicer – or least more mature – mantra than “We build blogs for the lawyers.” The latter from when we kicked things off at LexBlog in November, 2003. The Internet is about connecting with people in a real and intimate way. Always has been, always will be. There’s no such thing as differentiating between a “virtual world” and a “face-to-face” world.” One world, different mediums of engagement. Engagement leading to intimate relationships of trust. The last two weeks I heard again about the latent legal market in the United States. First at Clio Con and this week at LMA Annual. Depending on the survey, seventy-five to eighty-five percent of people with a legal issue – and who may be able to afford a lawyer – do not use a lawyer. The big reasons are that they don’t trust lawyers, they don’t know what lawyers do and, even if they did, they don’t know how to find a good lawyer. Shows you that despite lawyers, co...

Developing legal business through publishing is in large part about developing relationships. The content is merely the currency of the engagement that builds and nurtures relationships. The content enables you to engage someone. Maybe it’s the networking you do with someone who likes or networks with content, yours or someone else’s, that you share on LinkedIn. Maybe it’s meeting someone whose article you shared on Twitter. Maybe it’s the discussion that ensues from your emailing a client or prospective client something you or someone else wrote. Taking it up a notch, one could use an aggregation and curation engine, ala LexBlog’s Syndication Portal product, to showcase a large number of content publishers and organizations. How so? Look at Sheppard Mullin’s ‘In The Know ’ aggregating and curating blog posts from the firm’s over thirty legal blogs or the firm’s Coronavirus Insights publication which aggregates or curates their lawyer’s blog posts relating to the virus and pan...

Before talking with a larger law firm this morning, I made a few notes on what I’d be thinking about what starting a first blog. I thought I’d share them with you. One, Pick a winner. It’s not time to launch a blog for group of lawyers for the heck of it, because they just want to blog or because they just saw a blog in a competing law firm and thought they should have one too. You need to pick a winning area of the law and a winning lawyer or group of lawyers. Lawyers who are passionate about blogging and the area of the law that will be covered. This blog is going to be your role model for blogging lawyers to come. Blogging works in developing millions of dollars in new revenue. Killing off this new generator of revenue for any number of lawyers in your firm by dismissing blogs as a business development tool because this first blog didn’t work would be a major loss. If you’re in marketing, business development or communications and leading or coordinating this blog initiative, y...

The Wall Street Journal’s Sara Randazzo reports that large firms are prospering despite the Covid-19 economy. ”Many large law firms have excelled financially this year, even as some clients in sectors ranging from  hospitality to retail have suffered . The most elite firms say they are on track for a record year, thanks to hot practice areas like restructuring and public-offerings work, and many are doling out extra money to lawyers this fall. Firm leaders and consultants attribute the stability to lawyers’ ability to easily work from home, business that comes from a range of industries and practice areas, and a major reduction in travel expenses. ” At the onset of the pandemic, the legal industry braced for the worst, but come summer, law firms found their lawyers were still busy and many busier than the year before. Though certain practice areas took a hit, they have been off­set by boom­ing re­struc­tur­ing prac­tices, cap­i­tal-mar­kets work and lit­i­ga­tion, per Randaz...