2010 is off to a great start for Stem’s clients, with a bunch of new websites and media mentions. Here’s our monthly look at what they were up to throughout January:

• As noted earlier this week, Stem’s new client Gowlings released Trendwatch 2010, its annual roundup of legal trends that are likely to affect domestic and international businesses this year.
• Arizona law firm Nirenstein Garnice Soderquist rolled out a new blog, Arizona Elder Law & Probate Litigation Blog (the firm also maintains the Arizona Divorce & Family Law Blog).
• Phoenix DUI attorney Lawrence Koplow has added new service pages to his Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog, including Arizona drug crimes, asset forfeiture & seizure, fraud schemes, and DUI.
  
• At their Drug Recall Watch newsblog, products injury law firm Hissey Kientz LLP noted that pretrial proceedings for Yaz and Yasmin lawsuits are going forward in Illinois.
• Legal practice management software Clio announced its new Clio Facebook page as well as its new partnership with LawCharge.
• Mike Myers, a corporate-owned life insurance attorney at McClanahan Myers Espey was quoted in a pair of Houston Chronicle articles that detail a settled COLI case.
• Maureen Canning of The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center was quoted in a pair of articles on sexual addiction rehabilitation.
• West Palm Beach attorney Ron Chapman introduced new websites for his Florida bankruptcy practice & West Palm Beach Bankruptcy Blog.
• Nursing home abuse lawyer Jonathan Rosenfeld added several new categories (including malnutrition, dehydration, physically disabled patients, infections and gangrene) to his Bed Sore FAQ website.
• Miami criminal attorney Terry Lenamon at Lenamon Law has launched a new blog on the death penalty and capital crimes issues, www.deathpenaltyblog.com.
• At his New Jersey Criminal Defense Lawyer Blog, attorney John Marshall described a new law related to expungement of drug distribution charges.

We’ll be back in a month to share more notable projects and news.

Just wanted to post a quick note about my trip to Calgary yesterday to speak with the Calgary Legal Marketers.  Our presentation topic was building an effective web presence in the legal industry, and the issues covered included:

• some recent trends & adoption rates;
• the basics of lawyer SEO and link building tactics; and
• how lawyers & firms can participate strategically.

I had a wonderful time, and even caught an early flight back to the west coast! (gotta like it when that happens…) Many thanks to everyone who attended;  and especially to Karen Parucha and Caroline Baynes at Gowlings Calgary offices for inviting me & graciously hosting the session.

My PPT deck is embedded below:

Today marks the final entry in a series of excerpts from a Q-and-A session on how law firm marketers and PR professionals can get the most from members of the legal media. My thanks again to Paramjit Mahli for conducting this interview. We wrap up with advice for the new PR professional.

Q. Say a new PR person was starting from scratch and a partner wanted immediate coverage. Are there any words of wisdom could impart to them?

That’s a tough assignment — impatient partners are brutal to work for at the best of times, and “starting from scratch” probably means very few contacts in the media. This will come as no surprise, but relationships matter a lot in the legal media business. Journalists and editors tend to rely heavily on the freelance writers and marketing professionals who help bring them good stories, and breaking into those circles is a real challenge.

I’d say the best thing to do is start cultivating relationships with the media before the partner ever gets on the phone. Meet a reporter for lunch or take an editor for coffee, and focus the conversation on what they do and what they need. You’ll be pleasantly surprised by how pleasantly surprised media folks are when a PR professional takes an interest in what they do, rather than immediately talking about themselves and everything they can offer. Journalists are used to being treated as means to an end, so treating them as ends in themselves will, after the initial shock and wariness fades, prove to be a very constructive approach.

If you don’t have time to plant those seeds and watch them grow — if you need results straight away — then you should start by narrowing your focus. What exactly does the partner want? Is she looking to appear in a mainstream media periodical, a legal trade magazine, or a client publication? What sort of coverage does she want: attention for her pro bono work, a spotlight on a recent court victory, general praise for being such an all-around amazing lawyer? Then figure out which periodicals offer the best chance of success with these criteria — don’t bother trying to sell a monthly magazine on a story about a decisive trial result, for instance (you’d be surprised how often PR people don’t pay attention to publishing frequency and production deadlines).

At that point, you can start pitching — but again, put the focus on what the publication’s needs are and how well your proffered content can serve that need. Treat the editor or journalist as a partner, take their perspective into consideration, and you’ll be remarkably successful.

Continuing excerpts from a Q-and-A session on the intersection between legal marketing & PR and the legal media. Today’s conversation centers on law firm size and cross-border issues.

Q. Did you only work with and quote BigLaw lawyers, or did you also talk with lawyers from smaller and mid-size firms? Did you speak just with Canadian firms, or were you open to quoting legal sources from the U.S.?

I wrote a blog post last October at Law21 about the difficulties small and mid-size firms experience in trying to get noticed by the media. The gist is that large firms can outgun their smaller rivals just by throwing a lot of money into the publicity machine and cranking it up, although there are cultural issues at work too. It’s kind of an institutional problem, and I wouldn’t expect the media to correct it independently: if a mid-size or smaller firm wants to get its rightful share of publicity, it needs to make media relations a disproportionate priority.

Luckily, there are cost-effective ways of doing this. Twitter is great, although nothing beats blogs. And in any event, a mid-size firm doesn’t need to out-publicize the Clifford Chances of the world — it just needs to shine in its specific market or in the industry areas it deems most significant to its business plan. Smart media relations are an underrated tool for mid-size firms looking for a competitive edge.

In terms of the nationality of firms the magazine interviewed, a lot depended on the story itself. Obviously, I had no interest in speaking with American firms about American law for a Canadian publication, but I was always interested in U.S. firms that were doing something interesting on the practice management or business-model side, because these are universal issues for lawyers. The same applied to U.K., Australian and other firms worldwide.

But even for all that, there were still important distinctions when you crossed the border. I remember receiving a fine article last fall written by lawyers at four different firms worldwide about surviving the recession. But since Canada escaped the worst of the recession, it didn’t make sense for National to run it. And you always needed to be alive to the potential for pushing nationalist buttons: lawyers in one country want to read about themselves, not lawyers in a foreign jurisdiction. It’s challenging to recognize and promote globalized ideas to readerships that are often more interested in home-grown fare.

More from a recent Q-and-A session about how to deal editors and reporters in the legal media. The Wednesday entry is on what law firm websites do and don’t get right from a media perspective.

Q. Are there any specific items on the media pages of law firm websites that you and your editorial team preferred?

There are very few good media pages on law firm websites, to be honest. Some sites squirrel away their media contacts on an obscure “Contact Us” page. Others create media pages, but fill them with old press releases — or worse again, lists of the latest publications to feature one of their lawyers. Put it this way: if I see that one of your lawyers has been interviewed by a competitor publication, why would I now want to interview that lawyer for my publication? That would make me look like I was scouring the competition seeking sources. Firms invariably place this information, which is nothing more than marketing bumpf, on their media pages  — which is kind of pointless, because the people least likely to be impressed that a lawyer was interviewed by a reporter are other reporters.

The firms that get it right are the ones with media pages that serve the media’s purposes, not the firm’s. These websites make it incredibly easy for a reporter or editor to find a complete list of media contacts, two clicks at most from the home page. These pages specify which personnel handle which sorts of matters, so that the reporter needing a quote for a deadline 30 minutes away doesn’t wind up in the voicemail of the person who handles reprint permissions. These sites also comprehensively index their lawyers’ written work according to subject area, so that reporters looking for experts don’t need to skim through individual lawyer pages hoping to find an article on a topic of interest. When designing your media page, remember that its purpose is to make it easy for reporters to get your lawyers into their publication on the right topics. It’s not there for the firm to brag about itself.

Also, and I wrote about this on Law21 a while back, one of my major annoyances was that many law firms fail to list their professional staff on their websites. If I wanted to talk to a firm’s marketing director or recruitment chair or IT supervisor for an article, many firm websites were useless — as far as the sites were concerned, these positions didn’t even exist. The only employees many firms list on their sites are lawyers, and the firm often adds insult to injury by giving this list the title “Professionals.” Or worse: “People,” which presumably means that the director of professional development is either vegetable or mineral.

Designing a new logo and looking for new ideas? Try SeekLogo.com, a new search tool that indexes 200,000 downloadable vector graphic logos.

The term ‘law’ produced only 59 logos, so it’s not particularly heavy on legal examples;  but a database of 200K operational logo designs may help your next brainstorming session.

When we posted our last round of new additions to LawBlogs.ca, we wondered whether there was a future Clawbies winner among them. Well, as it turns out, there were three of them! Avoid a Claim, The Trial Warrior, and The Stream were all winners or finalists in the 2009 Clawbies, and each was less than six months old. How’s that for an auspicious start?

Here’s the newest batch of Canadian law blogs at LawBlogs.ca:

• Coloured Complexity (Christian Weisenburger)
• Avocat droit criminel (Xavier Cormier)
• Chaudhary Law Office (Max Chaudhary)
• PitbLAWg (Pitblado LLP)
• The KF Modified Blog (Tim Knight)
• Education Law Blog (Noah Sarna)
• Newfoundland Injury Law Blog (Ches Crosbie)
• Clicklaw Blog (Public Legal Education & Information Portal Project)
• Condo Law Blog (Fine & Deo)
• Labour and Employment Law Blog (Greg Gowe)
• Legalease on CKUT 90.3 FM (McGill)
• DL Blog(Michael Carabash)
• Newfoundland and Labrador Construction Law (Adam Baker)
• Employment-Law.ca (Matt Lalande)
• Lex Sustineo (Michael Torrance)
• E-Forensic Services Blog

We wish all of these new bloggers as much success as their blogging forefathers… may there be Clawbies in their futures!

All this week, I’m reproducing parts of a Q-and-A session with SCG Legal PR Network founder Paramjit Mahli about my former career in legal journalism and what legal marketers could learn from it. Today’s exchange: the phone pitch.

Q. What made you open and receptive to a telephone pitch? How did you prefer to be approached?

Telephone pitches are risky, for the same reason that telemarketer calls are risky – not many people like taking a call from a stranger who’s trying to sell them something. I’d advise a legal PR professional to start with a prior email identifying yourself, stating concisely what you’d like to talk about, and saying that you’ll be calling within the next 24 hours in hopes we can talk about it. Make the email professional yet friendly – you’re introducing yourself and laying the groundwork for a productive phone call.

In order for me to take a pitch over the phone even halfway seriously, I needed some prior knowledge of who the caller was, a sense of exactly what they intended to pitch, and confidence that they were specifically interested in my specific magazine. I hated wasting my time on the phone with someone who was just making the rounds of the legal periodicals with a one-size-fits-all pitch, or who didn’t understand what kinds of pieces appear in the magazine. If someone could prove to me, in a few words, that they knew the publication and could pinpoint exactly the right place where their piece could make it a better issue, I would pay attention. I have to say, though, that was an extremely rare occurrence.

I can’t count how many times I saw or heard the phrase “I thought you might be interested” in pitches. You can’t afford to “think” a journalist “might” be interested. You’ve got to know that what you have to offer is so well aligned with what that journalist needs that you’re certain this is a guaranteed winner for everyone. You have to be in the business of providing solutions to the media outlets with which you work, because while it might be the lawyer who pays your bills, it’s the journalist who has what you need.

Late last year, I had the pleasure of speaking with Paramjit Mahli, founder of the SCG Legal PR Network in New York City, about my experiences in legal journalism over the past dozen years. Our discussions led to an Q-and-A interview about how law firm communications and legal PR professionals should and should not interact with members of the legal media, which Paramjit has circulated to the members of her network. Today and throughout this week, I’m going to reproduce that interview in five short posts here at the Law Firm Strategy Blog, to give you some perspectives from the editor’s chair that could guide you in your future interactions with the media.

Today’s segment: what not to do when dealing with a journalist.

Q. What are the top three faux pas that legal media folks commit when approaching legal reporters?

1. You’re just conducting a mass email. I would get a pitch for, say, an article that discusses the ramifications of a Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals decision, which was really annoying because I edited a Canadian legal periodical that doesn’t report on U.S. case law. Same thing for proffered articles on the David Souter legacy or the Americans with Disabilities Act or what have you – I was clearly just on a mass-emailing list plucked from a directory somewhere. It was lazy and unprofessional, and all it did was get the sender added to a blacklist. Unsolicited and uncustomized emails from marketers lasted about five seconds in my inbox, if that.

2. You haven’t done any homework on the periodical. National rarely if ever published articles written by law firm lawyers on a new development in an area of law, and any marketing professional who’d even skimmed the last few issues would know that. So I got really tired of having to constantly write back to law firm marketing people to explain that we don’t publish those types of articles. It’s an example of the most common and most damaging aspect of legal PR: making pitches based on what the firm cares about, not what the periodical can use. Send journalists a message that you’ve read at least one issue of their magazine or have paid some attention to their editorial mandate. There’s no excuse for sending a pitch that’s not customized for the specific publication in question.

3. You’re addressing me by my first name and we’ve never met. This may be completely idiosyncratic, but it always bothered me no end to get a chirpy “Hi Jordan!” greeting from a complete stranger. Unearned familiarity is not the way to start a professional relationship. (This is worse for female journalists, by the way – John Smith may often be addressed “Dear Mr. Smith,” but Jane Smith will usually be addressed “Hi Jane”). In this, as in so many things, I take my cue from Ben Stone on Law & Order: “In polite society, sir, you don’t call a man by his first name unless he’s given you permission. I never did that.”

We don’t build or manage all of our client’s websites here at Stem.  Sometimes it’s us at the controls, and sometimes we collaborate with the client’s in-house or local web developer.  It’s an arrangement that works quite well most of the time.

One situation where it can cause problems, however, is responding to a website that has been hacked.  Ignoring the fact that security measures should be in place prior (complex passwords, login lockdown protection, etc.), the speed at which you respond to a website that’s been hacked is absolutely critical. Especially when it comes to protecting that website’s search rankings.

Let me explain a bit more… One of the biggest hacking problems out there currently is a completely stealth operation; that is, once control of the website CMS is taken over by the hacker, hidden pieces of code are injected (or files uploaded that run outside the target site’s navigation structure). The intruder’s spam insertion is also completely invisible to site viewers without inspecting the webpage code.  The hacker’s motive? To strip off some of the target website’s trust & link value, and route it to another money making venture.

Now unfortunately, the way most Firms (& Webmasters) find out about this type of attack is that their pages almost entirely drop out of search engines.  Here’s a frequent scenario:

• someone complains that they can’t be found in Google;
• webmaster inspects & the hacked code snippets are found;
• panic;
• passwords are changed globally; and finally,
• better security measures are put in place.

The bigger problem now? Google & the other search engines believe you run a spam website!  Suffice to say, you don’t want the headache of cleaning your site code, manually removing spam URLs from Google, and ultimately submitting a re-inclusion request explaining to BigG your remedies & new security.  So now – with context – finding out about any hack ASAP & responding before the search engines can index that spam code is … critical.

One helpful solution we came across recently, almost accidentally, is using WatchThatPage.  WTP is a tool we normally use to alert us about client news items & events (sans-RSS…). This time though, WTP identified that the client’s webpage had changed and alerted us within an hour of the attack. Rather than on-page text changes, the hacked-code insertion was detected.  The client was alerted, and their local developer had the site fixes in place a few hours later.

The end result?  Not one page dropped out of the search engines!

So two lessons I’d like to pass along:

1. Website security needs be taken seriously: At the very least, do these two things: 1) add longer complex passwords (10 characters plus, no dictionary words); and 2) lockdown your CMS login – if you use WordPress, we highly recommend the plugin linked above.
2. Get an alert service to email you when your webpage code has changed:  WatchThatPage proved to be a big help; and it’s likely we’ll expand it’s use to more client websites in the future.

As we wind down our 2009 ClawBies season, I’d like to highlight the blogged responses from this year’s finalists & award winners:

1. Shaunna Mireau
2. Antonin Pribetic (The Trial Warrior)
3. Law is Cool
4. David Fraser (Canadian Privacy Law Blog)
5. Dan Michaluk (All About Information)
6. Erik Magraken (BC Injury Law And ICBC Claims Blog)
7. Slaw
8. Michael Geist
9. Garry Wise (Wise Law Blog)
10. Charon QC
11. Blogosaurus Lex
12. David Doorey (Doorey’s Workplace Law Blog)
13. Karen Sawatzky (Library Technician Dialog)
14. Brian Bowman (On the Cutting Edge)
15. University of Alberta Faculty of Law Blog
16. Michael Fitzgibbon (Thoughts from a Management Lawyer)
17. David Bilinsky (Thoughtful Legal Management)
18. Dan Pinnington (Avoid a Claim)

I’ll also reserve the right to add any stragglers to this list, if and as they come in.