This past Friday, I gave a presentation at the ReInvent Law conference in Silicon Valley. Rachel Zahorsky of the ABA Journal wrote about the event here and the American Lawyer wrote about it here. There were 500+ attendees registered and some really interesting speakers. The focus of my talk was about the subject of my new book: lawyers, especially solos and small firms, should learn to collaborate with branded networks and where we are at this stage in that process. I believe a video of my presentation will be made available at some point online which will probably make way more sense than these slides do alone.
Overall, there was a lot of energy at this conference and more than a few calls to action, perhaps directed at some of the many legal tech companies and startups in the room.
“Not including branded networks as part of the lawyers online marketing strategy is bad business” Stephanie, this is a powerful statement. However, while I agree in part to leverage ones efforts this can be beneficial, it’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff and know precisely how the networks work, their reputation and much more. There may be a few leaders today and they may be getting a lot of VC but it’s important to maintain a healthy skepticism, too.
As you know from the rest of my work, Susan, ethics and best practices are a large part of what I preach. In this six minute presentation, I mentioned the need to develop best practices for working with these branded networks and that includes selecting which ones to work with. In my full book on the topic and partly in the free ebook I published, I have checklists for what to look for in selecting who to collaborate with and which marketing tools to use online. I also have full discussions of the ethics issues around this topic. I do believe that reaching the public online and becoming a larger part of the online conversation around legal services is going to require that lawyers get more involved in using the tools and technology that these companies are placing in front of the public to use.