Creating a Strategic Legal Marketing Plan for the Year Ahead

On December 9, 2021, Katie Lipp, Founder + CEO of Law Practice Queen Business Coaching LLC, presented for Lawline on “Creating a Strategic Legal Marketing Plan for the Year Ahead.” Katie’s co-presenters were Randi Rosenblatt, Founder and CEO of Upward Stride, and Emily Griesing, Chief Strategy Officer and co-owner of Bossible. 

This is a transcript of Katie’s section on social media marketing, which was recorded in late November 2021. This is copyrighted by Lawline, and the transcript is reposted here with permission, and adapted for Law Practice Queen Business Coaching.

I hope this excerpt is helpful to you. If you are a woman in law that needs help with getting more clients for your law practice, I hope you’ll check out The Network, my monthly business development membership. 

Check out The Network membership from Law Practice Queen here.

Katie Lipp: My name is Katie Lipp and I am in the Washington DC metro area, specifically, in Northern Virginia. I run Lipp Law firm, my own employment and business law firm, and then I also have a coaching practice where I coach attorneys on business development, called Law Practice Queen Business Coaching. 

Through Law Practice Queen, I have a business development membership where I coach female attorneys live every month on business development strategies. I’m excited to share my strategies with you today. 

I will be speaking about utilizing digital marketing to generate new work. This is just such an untapped resource that I see a lot of solos that can really dive in with both feet and just get new clients from digital marketing. When I say digital marketing, what do I mean? It can be anywhere you are operating online. For me, it's my website and also my LinkedIn page and my Instagram page, but maybe you are on other places online like Twitter, Facebook. 

Really, the possibilities are endless, and I would examine first and foremost, where are your ideal clients hanging out? Where are they hanging out online? For me and my lawyer coaching practice, the answer to that question was, they are hanging out on LinkedIn, and so I want to be on LinkedIn. I like to use LinkedIn, it's easy for me, but that may be different for you and your ideal client and what social media platforms you like to use. I’ll also get into your website as well in this piece of the discussion and that's relevant to all of us, everybody needs a website. 

Let's get into the social media statistics. I always like to give a little bit of information at the beginning because some people ask the question, why should I do this? It's always nice to give them revenue numbers, and so here's some statistics for you just to take home. You can look on your website and you can see where people are coming from before they went to your website. You can track those analytics, you can do it through Google Analytics and there's a lot of other types of programs that can track that data. I actually went through for, 2021, I looked at my law firm website to see where people were coming from and I just isolated LinkedIn specifically, and I had 371 and this is today. We're halfway through November and December is not in there yet, but I had 371 people come from LinkedIn to my law firm website. Those are 371 people that wouldn't have been there otherwise, and when you're looking at a solo practice, I mean, 371 more people is significant for most people. 

I want to encourage you to dive into social media because it is a way to generate revenue. It's a long game for sure, you can't just expect to start posting stuff and getting a client right away sliding into your DMs, you will get a lot of spam on social media. You'll have to weed through the dirt to get to the gold, but trust me, it is totally worth it. 

The way you can dive in, it differs for everyone, but what you are going for is you want people to know who you are and what you do. We want to be consistent for our audience so they remember what it is that we do, so when they maybe get a potential referral, they can remember who you are and they can send that person over to you so you can help and make goodwill deposits through your social media posts. 

What I mean by that is, for attorneys, I think we underestimate how much we know in the general public. I think we're like, oh yeah, everybody knows about contracts or everybody knows about employment law. They actually don't. There's a lot of new things that are coming out every day, legal trends and cases that you're looking at.

I know we can't pull information directly from cases, sometimes we have restrictions around confidentiality and ethics but there's a lot of information that we can share with the general public online about how we work with clients and the legal process that can really, really educate your client base. 

If you are just stuck on where to start on social media, I would just introduce yourself to your network. 

Think about going on to LinkedIn, slapping a picture of yourself up there, professional looking picture and say, hi, here's my name, here's what I do, here's who I help and I look forward to getting to know you. Those posts can go a long way. Just staying connected with your audience is a great place to start. 

Your website is your digital business card. You want to make sure your website is clean; I can't tell you how many law firm websites I've gone on or just websites in general where it just cluttered with all kinds of different stuff and it's not clear what they do or what type of client they help.

Sometimes the information on the website is out of date, you can tell, but they're not really updating the website regularly. I would encourage you for purposes of getting clients try to think about who your ideal client is. 

It doesn't have to just be one, but you should have a general idea of who you want to serve, and then on your website there should be very pertinent information about how you can help them and how they can get in touch with you. 

You want to make it easy for people. Your website is a launchpad for people to contact you. It's a funnel. You want to funnel them to the phone or to the email. 

One other way you can do that is you can do, I have it on my website, you can check it out if you want, lipplawfirm.com. When somebody is leaving the website, I have a pop-up that says, hey, wait a minute, love to keep you on our email list if you want updates about employment law in DC, Maryland, and Virginia. I can't tell you how many more people have gotten on my email list, just from that little pop-up. 

You want to get people on your email list because think about it, social media is great for staying in touch, staying top of mind what not, but as we've seen recently, like with the Facebook incident where Facebook went down for a day, Instagram went down for a day, social media is completely out of our control, we don't own it. 

If a website like Facebook or Instagram goes down one day, we don't have any control over that, but we do have control and ownership over our email list, and so I would strongly encourage you to do regular blog post that you can send out to your email newsletter list just to educate your audience. You're educating, you're also community building and you want to keep them informed on what's going on with your area of the law.

It doesn't have to be a long drawn out post. You don't have to talk about case law, you can just say, a one easy post that you can put together is frequently asked questions post about your practice area. i.e., personal injury law or business law, trademark law…perhaps how you help clients through the trademarks process. 

A lot of those process-type or FAQ-type posts are really good for clients, and by updating your website regularly, by sending out email newsletters, you will help with search engine optimization, which is basically, when people go and type into Google, a lot of what people are searching for, it's usually like employment lawyer near me, business lawyer near me. You want to try to put in terms that people are searching into Google, so then they are directed to your website. You can spend boatloads of money on search engine optimization, if you really want to, there's lots of marketing firms out there that do great work, but I think if you have a limited budget, just trying to put together a weekly blog posts for your website can really, really draw in a lot of clients to your law practice. That's how I get the majority of my clients, is through my website, through search engine optimization and then also through word of mouth and through LinkedIn as well. LinkedIn, I would say fluctuates. If I'm looking at my analytics for how people get funneled to my website, it usually, hovers between the third spot and sixth spot depending on and other things, but it's just something to think about.  

I'm going to talk to you about what type of content works on social media. When you're networking with your clients or with your potential clients, with your network, you want to be authentic, you want to be original, and that's the same type of theme that you want for your social media posts.

This is a long- term branding strategy. You want to curate, what is it that people will think when they think about you, a lawyer. I would encourage you to journal this out, or you can just pull up a word document and type this out. What words do you want people to think of when they think of your brand? I'm going to put a pin in that so Emily can go more into the branding strategy. 

When you're posting content, you really want to focus on the reader. Not so much you as an attorney, that's a big mistake that attorneys make when they get on social media. They talk a lot about themselves, how great their firm is, how many degrees they have and where they went to school. What I've discovered after almost 12 years of doing this is clients don't really care a whole lot about where you went to school and how fancy your pedigree is.

Clients are really concerned with, can you help me, and do you know what you're doing? Can you give me a good result? Can you win my case? The tough part that attorneys get bottlenecked on from an ethical standpoint, you have to be careful what you post there. You can't over-promise what you're going to do for a client, but you can talk about for clients like frequently asked questions. I know I mentioned the trademarks process, but if you do personal injury about going through personal injury lawsuit process or negotiating with your insurer three mistakes to avoid when you get into a car accident. 

Just different things like that where you can really walk the client through the process as much as possible. I would encourage you; I know we're super busy as attorneys to repurpose content as well. I've started doing that a lot lately. You don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. 

One of the other mistakes I see attorneys doing on LinkedIn, for example, they'll just post a link to an article, and they won't provide any context. Just keep in mind like people are really just scrolling through on their phones and so you want to post something that stops the scroll. 

Whether that's interesting quote, people love looking at quotes. If you look at Instagram, it's like half quotes. A picture, a video. I'll get into video content in a moment. 

Let's talk about what content works…think about what would help your clients. You want to be careful, you don't want to alienate your client base, of course, I can talk all day about posts that I didn't do so well, where like maybe they were I do both sides of employment law, so I have to be careful not to alienate employers and also not to alienate employees. I tend to focus a lot on, what is the law, what's this legal update, that really bridges both sides for me?

Just to give you an example for what I like to do. Usually, I'd do the employment law updates, business development tips are always something that bring in a wide audience. Thinking about, if you've just started your practice, I know

some people, they start out a practice. Maybe they take on one particular practice area and then they think about adding maybe some additional practice areas because they think they're going to make them a little bit more money, I would just really encourage you to focus on practice areas that you genuinely like.

If you hate what you're doing and you hate your practice area, I would really encourage you to examine that because when you go to post things about your practice online, if you're not excited about it, then the people reading it will get excited about it either. You want to think about the passion behind it as well.

I know I'm getting a little woo woo here, the post really is an energy transfer and the state of mind you're in when you write the post really tends to come through for the reader. You just really want to think about, like if you're angry when you're writing a post, avoid that. You want to be in a good helpful mood when you're writing the posts, when you're creating the post.

Again, going back to those introductory posts, like, here's who I am, here's what I do. If you need a ramp-up to getting involved on social media, you can also just comment on other people's posts and develop networking that way first before ramping up to original content, because I know plenty of attorneys who are just like, I don't have time for it, I can't be doing that thing, and that's okay too. This is not a one size fits all thing.

One other thing on this slide, this is what should you post? I've been getting into different categories, but I would avoid selling your services like the hard sell does not do as well on social media. You could do that in your e-mail list a little bit more.

The best way that I've accomplished the hard sell on LinkedIn is maybe I'll do an information post on the actual post and then in the comments, I'll say, if you're interested in, x, y, and z, here's some more information about my membership for women in law. When your post is just directly a hard sell, they don't tend to do as well. You really want to focus on brand awareness and education and introducing people to who you are and people gravitate towards people not necessarily brands. 

Then a bottom line thing to remember when you're posting, always ask, are you helping your ideal client with your posts? I feel like you can never go wrong with that. 

Viral posts, a lot of people ask me, how do I go viral? I want to go viral. I mean, there are different ways that you can accomplish it. The more vulnerable you are in the post that can really help you with a viral post. What is viral? It's something that you share. It's a shareable post. That's why it's sometimes important to strip yourself away instead of saying, hey, here's this thing about me, focus about what can the reader relate to? Like really it's relatability and people are sharing it, either because it's really funny or because it triggers something in them. Which is one of my biggest qualms about social media.

A lot of the content that can sometimes go viral is stuff that makes people mad. It brings out this visceral reaction in some people. Some of my most viral posts are either, I had a big one when I started my law firm and I announced starting of my law firm and of course, like everybody like to congratulate you on that, but I've done a few very vulnerable, not horror stories but like very cringy stories about being in the legal industry and different experiences I've been through, but you're sharing your journey. It's something where there's not a straightforward formula. 

I would just encourage you to not focus as much like if you're posting things just for the response, that sometimes misses the point because you can still develop a lot of business for yourself online without going viral and without having a huge newsletter list and without having a ton of clients. It's not always just about the numbers. The most important thing to remember and my biggest tip for posting is staying consistent and not confusing your audience on what you do.

One of the biggest mistakes I see lawyers doing with their brands is they say they do all this different stuff and then people have very short memories and don't really remember, what does this person actually do? If you're posting about what you do online, I would just keep it narrow. You can always expand it and build upon it, but keeping it narrow can be very helpful. Then like don't be so niche that you're like niching out everybody and every potential customer. 

Think about trying to strike a good balance there but staying consistent. Who do I help? What do I do? Who am I? That's really all you're doing online and just trying to help other people with their practices, in your comments, trying to be as helpful and professional as possible. 

Tips for posting, this is something I just go through my process for posting. Post something and then do something else for a little bit. Don't be checking every two seconds to see if you have likes or comments or whatnot. I would recommend responding to the comments, because social media platforms love engagement.

Really good posts that tend to have a broad reach that the algorithm pushes out, there's a lot of engagement there. Think about engagement when you're posting too and do a call to action, what do you think? Love to hear your thoughts, that kind of thing. Then again, like going back to what Randi said with networking reach out, make sure it's proofread. Nobody wants to hire a lawyer or consultant with typos in their information. Make sure there are no typos in your work product online. 

Video content is just amazing for social media and brand awareness…talk about stopping the scroll. I know we don't always have time to do our hair, and do our makeup for the ladies, or for the gentlemen, throw on a nice outfit. Video content can really, really expand your reach and it can help with the no like trust element for people that are hiring you. Video content, in my opinion, is just unmatched. 

Do video content, strive to do video content, if you don't know how to do it, you can certainly ask a friend or get a consultant to help you with it, and makes sure for accessibility, you're adding subtitles. A lot of people watch social media without the sound on. Maybe they're in bed next to a spouse or maybe they're in a crowded place and they don't want people to hear what they're watching, so adding subtitles, a lot of people scroll the feed without the sound on. Just a couple more slides and then I'm going to turn it over to my colleague Emily.

Just a few things to avoid. I see a lot of attorneys on LinkedIn talking about awards. I'm pleased to inform you that I am the super lawyer, and trust me, I've done it myself, so all of these mistakes I've made myself too and I'm not saying don't ever toot your own horn, but a good standard is don't post anything on LinkedIn that you wouldn't send to your coworkers. Avoid negative energy.

Like if you're wanting to respond to a comment you get and engage in a battle with somebody, please just walk away, please, please, please just walk away, you can just like their comment and then just don't engage. One good thing to think about is when you're posting something, what is your intention? My intention in posting things online, so LinkedIn, Instagram, is to help my audience. That's it.

My intent is not to engage with people as much in the comments just because people have different opinions. If somebody wants to disagree with me, that's great. We're engaging, but I'm not going to get into back and forth debate. Trust me, it never ends well. These are some good things to remember when you're posting. 

I'll just go through a summary slide before I turn it over to Emily, who's going to talk about creating a marketing and business development plan. Just in summary, be consistent, focus on your audience, add attorney connections on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is one of the amazing social media networks because you can add people and yourself. Of course, they have to approve you as a connection, but it's a good way to connect with other attorneys so you can get referrals from other attorneys on LinkedIn. 

Keep your website updated regularly with blog posts and relevant content for your ideal client, and most importantly, have fun. Please take this time right now, just take a quick break and please connect with all of us on LinkedIn.

If you have any other questions after this, you can feel free to reach out to us. Of course, you can email us and you have our contact information, but please connect with me and Randi and Emily on LinkedIn. With that, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to Emily.

 I hope this excerpt was helpful to you. If you are a woman in law that needs help with getting more clients for your law practice, I hope you’ll check out The Network, my monthly business development membership. Check it out here.

Emily Griesing:

For starters, I'm going to go through some terms because I think it's really helpful to understand what each of them mean and how they all work together when you're promoting yourself or your firm. Let's just start with the brand. This is a quote I pulled from a very well-known branding strategist, thought leader in her industry, and it's something that I always think about. I'm creating the brand for my business or advising lawyers or other types of business owners on what their brand means. The definition of a brand is to have meaning beyond your name. When you have a great brand, you create a emotional connection with your target audience. Rather than simply thinking of a logo or a name, but what does it evoke when they think of you? I really think it's important to think about that way before you're diving into your marketing plan. Because instead of just going to the end of, "I need to be on social media, I need to go through my context" but what do you want people to think of when they think of you? That's your brand. Again, like I said, and this is so obvious, pretty frequently, I see this with clients is they don't actually write it down. It's in their head. Take the time to actually write down the work that you do, what you want people to hire you for. You also can write down the things you're not interested in doing anymore. Something that I think was really important that's already been brought up in this discussion is narrowing in on your areas of focus in your practice. Two to three is the sweet spot that I tend to advise, because it's enough that you have some diversity and you are nimble should the market change.

For example, years ago, during the financial crisis, maybe if you were focusing on real estate, you would be pivoting to something else. Or now in the pandemic era, things are more of focus now, like privacy than maybe ever before.

Really coming up with you to focus on rather than saying, I do a lot or I do anything, it really can be confusing to an audience that has, I think like Katie mentioned, there's so much content out there and there's so many people trying to put their name out, that if they're getting mixed messages as to what to think of when they think of you, it will be very confusing. I think it's really important that if you start before you sell anything is really what are those things that you want to be known for and that you want to pursue? The buckets, both of your practice areas. From a state planning to IP, to construction law, to hospitality, and then what is that audience within that group? If it's a state planning, are you focusing on high net worth individuals?

If it's hospitality, are you looking up hotels and restaurants and sports venues in your area? Are you doing it nationally? Thinking really not just about, I only do employment law, but I remember when Katie is introducing herself, or actually I think Randi did this as well. Where are they located? What is their geographic area? What is that audience within that, that they can serve? Because it often can be wide. Who can pay you? Really is usually what it comes down to. From there, that's really the foundation of your plan. That's step 1.

Then from there these two buckets that I think are just really helpful to define. Marketing is about brand awareness. If people don't know who you are or don't know what your firm is, they can't call you, they can't email you. That seems pretty obvious. A lot of some of what was being talked about earlier, especially by Katie, is so for social media. They might not know who Katie is. They might be someone else that they're connected to. Might like her content. That's what led them to her. They can see, this is her firm, this is the name of it.

She specializes in employment law. That's really where the awareness pieces. I think about is spreading a large net to as many people as possible associated your name with whatever those two to three buckets are that you've decided upon. Then from there is the Part 2, which is the business development that Randi was speaking about. That's where the relationship building comes in. How can you help this person? What can you do for them? That's really where it's much more customized, it's much more personal.

But the marketing is again, this big web that you're putting out into the world in a variety of different ways that then can lure people in to learn more and find out specifically how you can serve them. Good, I just wanted to clarify those two pieces because that's how I break them down and I create these plans for folks and just an overview. These are the components that I like to include when I make these plans. Again, there's different things, but in some of this has already been covered.

But I think just to get a comprehensive view of what falls into the marketing bucket and what can fall into the business market. For marketing again, nothing starts without identifying what you want to be known for and what your areas of expertise are. Then you can start to think about some of the thought leadership avenues that you can pursue in order to really convey that you are the expert that you said you are or even if you're not quite an expert in an area yet, but you see that there's an opportunity for it to grow. You can begin to start research and coming up with topics that you can speak to around those areas.

That's typically writing and speaking. Obviously everyone has their strengths. People love to be in front of an audience, loved programs like this that we're doing today. Others of us prefer to be behind the scene and use our writing skills or other things, do things in person. It's really just think out what's fit for you and where you excel. But honestly, as much as you can diversify what you do and try different things. You might be catching people in different avenue because you never know who is going to be reading a certain paper, who's going to be watching something. As much as you can reach them in different platforms the better. That's bucket number 1. I'm going to go through each of these in more detail too. But secondly, community and professional organizations. I think Randi touched on this a little bit, is certain affinity groups, non- profit boards, other legal groups. I'm going to go into several different ones just taken from clients I've worked with. But these are just different ways that you can just get people to know who you are. Hi, this is me, this is what I specialize in. This is my firm.

This is where we're located. Then lastly, awards are the ones that tie all of these things together. It gives you credibility. It's really just something that a lot of these high-profile awards that will go into. They do their own promotion. By being nominated or even being given many of these legal awards and other types of awards, they're going to be promoting your name for you, either on their social media channels, their website, their print magazine. Of course, it feels good to be recognized for your work and that's very important and gives you legitimacy. But even more so is it just a free app marketing for you. That's the marketing categories. I'm not talking about digital marketing, which we're already touched upon, but these are other external things. Then the Business Development section. I'm not going to go into the networking because Randi covered that very well and just the difference between connecting with the people that you already know and the best way to do that as well as meeting and introducing yourself to new people.

But then the area I am going to talk about that wasn't covered yet is the RFP process. Proposals and response proposals and who is at the right fit for and how to get started on that if you have never done so before, especially for your smaller or solo firm. That's just the overview from your marketing and business development plan in the future. Speaking and writing. Again, I already mentioned this, everyone has what they are naturally good at and maybe less, but these are just some places to start. Many of these there, it's completely free and they're often looking for speakers to participate. Here we are low-lying doing this right now. There's numerous CLE providers that are constantly looking for experts to speak on a variety of topics, especially things that are trending or industries that are rapidly changing. Or again, like what happened in the past year and a half where everyone's transitioning to practicing law in a way that they maybe never have force. If you are someone that is keeping your finger on the pulse of whatever's going on in your area, your region, your practice area, whatnot. Those are things that can be used and shared in a variety of different ways in order for you to develop new business. There's everything from just someone seeing you speak and really resonating with what you're saying and then thinking of you when they need something to also someone immediately thinking, oh, I have a referral for this person or it can be something like I'm on a committee for something and this would be a great person to join my committee.

It's not always as linear is drawing in business, but really just thinking of you and associating with you with the things that you would like to be associated with. Speaking and writing are huge and very effective ways to do so. In tandem with what Katie was saying is that these are also more souls that you can use on your digital marketing, on your website, on your social media. Again, it can be hard to create new content from scratch, especially if you're not used to it. But the more that you're putting out new things through either any type of speaking and writing are the perfect opportunity to share on your digital platforms. That's how it often ties in.

Organizations. Again, I put them into two different buckets, just non- profits as an umbrella. These don't have to be law related. Again, I think Randi, said this is so important, is really only give time to things that you care about. Clean up beneficial to the other people. You're not going to enjoy it and could potentially present your time doing it. Really pick things that speak to you and your values and what you care about. Meeting people on non-profit boards and committees is a great way to generate new relationships and in a very authentic way without being like, I'm here to sell you, but rather, we have a shared interest, we have this thing in common. Let's have a conversation about what we do. This is a wonderful way to give back while also putting yourself out there and what you do.

Professional associations are a little bit more obvious. I think we all know about the bar associations, but there's many depending on what your area of law is. I just threw in a bunch here from clients of mine. For construction lawyers, there's organizations for IP lawyers for people who do ADR, CPR is a great one. There's always something where if you have already been doing something for a long time, there's a group of your peers who are gathering and exchanging information. Or if you're new and trying to get into a new area to wonderful join one of these organizations because it's a great place to meet people who are really forward thinking in that area. These are two huge pieces that I think really any lawyer doesn't matter if they're in a big law firm to a solo to be current being involved so that they can keep the finger on the pulse of whatever your audience and clients need to know. That's also just another way that people think of you to refer you work. It's another thing that just boost what you can put on your website, your social media, your resume, your email campaigns, everything in between. It's also just proves that you're a good person. I think most people want to hire someone who have respect.

That's another piece of the plan that is incredibly valuable. Awards. Yes, I brought a bunch of these up already.

Here's just several that I've worked on some you can submit yourself, some of you have to be nominated by a peer. They all have different rules, but sure many are familiar, but there's also where you can get a little bit more niche. If you like Katie are so an entrepreneur you can also be eligible to win certain awards related to entrepreneurs in your area, or women business leaders or LGBT leaders, or if you fall into any of the bottler group besides lawyer, you honestly have a chance to distinguish yourself from the pack by applying for other awards suit you. Again, there's legal tackle or is it really as niche as you would like based on your area. But trust me, there's something for everyone from junior lawyers all the way to senior lawyers. That's just a great way for people to remember you and think of you. This is honestly a place that I have found that people get a lot of traction hearing from people they haven't heard in years, when they'll read about them in the paper, or they'll see a post about them being recognized for something. Again, there are places and times too to your own horn because you should be proud of your work, or why else would you do it? But at the same time, of course, doing in a way that feels the most comfortable for you. But this is really about again, not just, hire me, I'm great, but how can I help you? This is why I'm an expert in what I do and how I can help in many ways is we can demonstrate that to audience, that is the hope. Awards are really the culmination of all of those different pieces.

I'm just circling back to this again. Just a summary of how all those pieces work together and your mark and then segueing back into business development. You have all these various different ways that you want to get your name out there, your firm. Typically, I do this even if it's a small firm, each individual person should have one of these plans. Because their focus might be different, their strengths might be different. So yes, of course, having a master plan for a firm of just these buckets is really helpful and really important.

But then from there, each individual has their own thing that they can stand out. Really it's always, you never know, is it going to be the person that brings in the work? Is it going to be the firm and then they find their way to you? You never really know where that touch point might necessarily happen. It's really important that each individual within a firm, each attorney has their own plan each year that caters to their strengths and their goals. Because that's what's most likely to succeed. Just because some lawyer who works in another firm in a similar areas doing X, Y, or Z that doesn't necessarily mean that that's where you will resonate. You want to find the lanes that you feel you can stick out.

Then when it comes to generating business. This is a really, really big area. It's been changing a lot in the six years I've been working in legal marketing. But I know there are many firms who are responding to RFPs is very new or they think it's not for them. I think I just want to go into just some of the general basics of who this is for, who this will best benefit and how to tackle it. The two big buckets of business, and this isn't for everyone, but for many firms these are two big targets. Large Fortune 500 publicly traded companies, government agencies are constantly putting out requests for proposals or request for information. Either one about legal services in general with a variety of different practice areas within that or a specific type of experts. Or it can get even more granular where it's for a specific case.

Basically what you want to be doing if either companies or government agencies are in your list of your clients, is that you want to make sure you and your firm are being alerted to the types of opportunities that will suit you, should they arise. I think a lot of figuring out the RFP maze is that you want to make sure that you're on the list to be alerted. How a lot of this can happen is through making sure that you are registered as a supplier on these portals.

Pretty much every government agency and large company has a platform that they use online for suppliers to register themselves. It asks for a lot of basic information such as geography, size, some asks for a revenue. But often we want to know what you're known for. What is your area of the law? What is your history with it? Where do you serve? So that when something comes out, you get alerted to those usually it be an email that there has been an RFP that has been released.

Is this something that you'd be interested in responding to? Really a great way to begin to dip your toe into this space if you're not ready to full dive in because it can be a more elaborate process, is that you can be a sub-consultants.

Especially for small and even solo firms who maybe don't have the infrastructure that a large firm would have to respond to a very large RFP. They can often be perfect to go on as a sub-consultants to a prime who is going after one of these especially if there's a specific area of focus on that firm, large firm might need to beef up their chances of winning the work. Especially if you have a very niche specialty and have a track record in a certain area or a certain type of work, it can be very, very viable for you to go on as a sub-consultants for these RFPs. Sometimes that's as simple as just letting your network know that you're open to these types of opportunities. Since pretty much every big firm goes after these and many mid-size firms go after these as well. So really letting your network know that this is something you're open to and that you're there. This is just, that's a good way to begin because it can be a long process and it can be intimidating. But that's really the best way to go if you're starting to try to reach for these larger entities and bringing in work. This could be a whole another program and maybe it will, but just trying to give a general overview of this is a really great area to start pursuing if you haven't quite thought of it yet.

The portals. Let me just go a little bit into this in terms of diversity. Touching upon this a bit is in addition, to there just being way more opportunities for any type of firm to respond to RFPs is now there's increasingly being set asides for certain work that is done by a diverse supplier. So a diverse law firm in this case or a diverse lawyers in this case. Diverse, falling in a variety of categories, women owned, minority owned, LGBT owned, veteran, small business, etc.

Each of them have various qualifications. But really just as a big effort to promote diversity in this profession that I think very much needs it, is to have companies say, we're going to give a certain amount of this work to the people who meet a diversity criteria. Again, you don't necessarily have to be a diverse firm in order to pursue RFPs or win them. But it can be a big benefit, especially as more businesses are making those very public commitments and saying, we're giving a certain amount of our legal work to either a diverse law firms or lawyers.

Though they can get very granular and really ask very nitty-gritty questions about who's on your team, how many people do certain things. If you fall into one of those categories, it can be very, very beneficial for you to get certified as such. Then from there to partner with other firms that might be interested in pursuing opportunities with you, especially if you are smaller and could really be an asset to a large firm that would like to work with a diverse firm on responding to the RFPs.

In order to register on these portals, which anyone can do, it doesn't have to be a diverse firm. But it's pretty simple, they all have, it's usually a form online that you submit and then you'll start to get emails for things that suit whatever your practice is. But it can be often challenging to know about these opportunities without filling out this form. It can happen, but that's the way that the market is going in the supplier space. Just really, really general again, because we don't have enough time to go into all the nitty-gritty of this but just when you're starting to think about whether RFPs are for you or whether a specific RFP is worth your time and energy, these are just some things that you definitely want to consider doing a cost-benefit analysis. These are very time- consuming, if you are newer to this process, it can be wise for you to really sit down and think about, do I have the team to work on this? Do I have the team to work on this should I win it? Also, is this my area that I know I'm an expert in and could do this work easily?

Or are they a little bit more far-fetched? It's not exactly what you do, well, you're newer to this industry. It's always good to have conversations about fit before you dive in. Again, if you are very new to it, I strongly advise starting as a sub-consultants, seeing how the process works with firms that have done this before, or businesses that have done this before, and then slowly starting to move up from there. From there or just if you're like, we're going for it, we're doing it, let's give it a shot make sure you think about what the limitations are.

This should ideally come up in that cost-benefit analysis. But think about, what are the requirements? Are there certain things that you're going to need to meet in order to do it? Again, bandwidth, all of those things, so very important to think about that. Again, gather all of the relevant information that you need about your firm, about your attorneys. It definitely requires a lot of calling. Once you have your story down, your bios down, your practice areas down it can be repurposed, but it can be a lot of heavy lifting at the beginnings. Making sure you have your story behind you and your firm in order to pursue these effectively. Then again, obviously high-quality. We talked several times, counting your T's, I can't even say it I'm doing it wrong. Crossing your t's, dotting your i's making sure that everything is thorough and professional and you have the bandwidth and support on your team to put forward something that is very high quality and high level to give you the best chance of securing that work.

Then lastly, before we wrap up, so I mentioned diversity a little bit, but I just want to quickly touch upon it for those who aren't aware. I mentioned certification. In order to be eligible to start responding to RFPs and winning work with potentially new clients in this way, you need to be certified really just to confirm that your business is run by a diverse of someone who falls into a diverse categories. There's variety of different ones, some people fall into several. But there's different certifying bodies that do that and it's usually something that's done on a yearly basis. Is well worth your effort if you are trying to pursue RFPs and are a diverse business or a diverse lawyer. Then secondly, another avenue to explore besides certification is like, what are other groups that you can learn that are at the cutting edge of what diversity in the law? Where is it going? What's working? What's happening? What work needs to be done?

I know that some of these ladies on the call are involved in some of these groups. But these are just some that really are at the forefront of making the legal profession more diverse. How you as a diverse lawyer can take advantage of that and use it to your benefit and in navigating some of the challenges of it. I also just threw on a couple of organizations that are worthy of note if you're interested in that. I see we're just at about time. If you have any questions, please turn them over to the Q&A, and we'll go through them.

You have our contact information so feel free to reach out to any or all of us if you have questions. Again, as Katie said, please reach out to us on LinkedIn we'd be happy to connect with you. Thank you for joining.