In the profession of family law, your interactions with your clients affect your professional reputation more than anything else does. Despite this, professional networking is as important in family law as it is in many other professional fields. Working on your current cases and marketing your law firm in order to attract new clients takes up all of your time. Lawyers have a 24/7 job, so who has time to engage in apparently leisurely activities where you may or may not meet professional colleagues who may or may not do something in the future that directly or indirectly leads to you getting more money? Just as you have gotten used to engaging in your work while doing non-work tasks, such as when you respond to work emails while waiting in line to pick your children up from school, you can also engage in professional networking in time-efficient ways. Even the busiest family law attorneys can make time to get to know colleagues in their field and to contact them when there is a professionally beneficial reason to do so.
Attend Professional Conferences as Much as Your Networking Budget Allows
The days when law firms had huge budgets to pay for their lawyers to fly to conferences in fancy hotels, take well-connected attendees out to dinner at fancy restaurants, and charge it all to the law firm’s expense account are long gone. Especially if yours is a small law firm, you do not have the money to spend time on activities that do not have an immediate payoff. Therefore, traveling the world under the pretense of professional networking is not an option for you.
You can, however, afford to attend professional conferences in your own city and within commuting distance. Just put on your best clothes that you wear for court appearances, and for the price of conference admission and parking, you can meet all the people who traveled from out of town to attend. The fact that you made the time to attend the conference on such a small budget shows your dedication to your work. Think of it as making professional connections on another law firm’s dime.
Collaborate With Other Law Firms on Digital Marketing Initiatives
Digital marketing should be part of every law firm’s strategic plan; no law firm can survive on billboards alone, no matter how clever their advertising slogans or how memorable their personalized toll-free numbers are. Today, most clients find the lawyers they hire through Google searches, with word of mouth coming in at a distant second. One of the least expensive and most effective ways to boost your law firm’s search engine optimization (SEO) rankings.
Yes, you can hire digital marketing firms to create content for your blog, but if that is beyond your budget, you can create equally effective content by writing it yourself or assigning employees of your law firm to write it. If you read a few online guides about digital content creation, you can easily grasp what makes a blog post effective. Of course, sharing your limited resources is the key to prosperity. Trading guest blog posts with other small law firms in your state is an easy way to increase your digital marketing momentum. If you post a blog post by a lawyer at another firm on your website, and the other law firm posts your blog post on it, both firms gain visibility from each other’s websites. If you are ready to venture into video marketing content, you can even interview lawyers from other law firms and post the interviews on your site.
A Thoughtful Email is Worth a Thousand Firm Handshakes and Megawatt Smiles
The true measure of success in professional networking is not how many people’s phones hover near yours and add themselves to your contact list but how many people you contact and what you say when you do. Interactions at professional networking events tend to be generic, or at least they start out that way. At one conference, you can promise to stay in touch with dozens of people.
Collaboration does not begin, however, until you contact a specific colleague for a specific reason. Email someone you met at a conference because you have a legal question or to invite them to write a guest post about a specific topic on your law firm’s blog. Start with specific details from your previous interaction with the person. Then, be specific about the purpose of your email and what you are inviting the person to do.
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