Stem clients had another busy month of blogging, media appearances, and community activites. Here are some highlights of the past month:

• Stem welcomed our newest client, British Columbia law firm Waterstone Law Group.  Like myself, Waterstone’s offices are located in B.C.’s beautiful Fraser Valley.  Founded in 1994, the firm features lawyers who formerly practised in the Vancouver market, and now offer that experience locally.  If you sift through their lawyer profiles, you’ll also see they’re a model for community involvement!
• West Palm Beach Criminal Lawyer Ron Chapman posted a new article on his Federal Crimes FAQ site, addressing when a car passenger is not guilty of conspiracy to commit a drug crime. Over at his Florida Criminal Records FAQ site, Mr. Chapman discusses whether a judge can deny a request to expunge a record without providing reasons.
• Jack Newton of Law Practice Management software solution Clio announced that he will be joining the cooperative legal blog Slaw as a weekly contributor starting in early September. Mr. Newton will blog on cloud computing, practice management, and other legal technology topics.
• Clio also announced this month that 30 new consultants have now joined the Clio Certified Consultants Partner Program. This is in addition to the six inaugural consultants who were retained when the program was instituted earlier this summer.
• Canadian law firm Gowlings carried out a community service endeavour, Volcano Project 2010, in which a team of five legal professionals and seven business leaders donated $30,000 to Fondation du Dr Julien and provided building materials and physical work to a school in Antigua Guatemala, before undertaking a 3020-metre climb of San Pedro Volcano.
• Hissey Kientz LLP has added two new service pages. The first discusses the connection between Yasmin and Yaz and heart attacks, and the second is an enhanced page about the linkages between Asbestos and Cancer.
• Mike Myers of McClanahan Myers Espey LLP posted articles on the firm’s Contingent Fee Business Litigation Blog dealing with a federal court’s refusal to dismiss an insurer’s “stranger originated life insurance” policy (STOLI) suit and the counterclaim the insurer faces.
• Over on the Arizona DUI Defense Blog, Lawrence Koplow posted the first part of his analysis of Arizona DUI first offenses and the apparent low deterrent impact of harsher penalties. The firm also launched the Arizona Sex Crimes FAQ, a new resource targeted at those falsely accused of sexual offenses in Arizona.
• BC legal support services provider Dye & Durham kept the local British Columbia legal community updated with a number of industry items, including an updated BC litigation calendar for August and posts about BC courts and registry services.
• Fresh from the three corporate counsel workshops presented this month at the Canadian Legal Conference in Niagara,  the Canadian Corporate Counsel Association has been coordinating with other corporate counsel associations from around the world to plan the Corporate Counsel World Summit in Toronto this September.
• Strellis & Field elder law attorney Jonathan Rosenfeld posted many new articles on his Nursing Homes Abuse Blog, including one reviewing a sampling of the patient personal injury matters they have prosecuted beyond the expected nursing home abuse: medical malpractice, automobile accidents, industrial accidents, asbestos exposure, and products liability.
• Over at his Bed Sore FAQs site, Mr. Rosenfeld continues to expand the content on the site, including Bed Sore Articles and the Bed Sore Glossary.
• News updates on the website of Arizona family firm Nirenstein Garnice Soderquist PLC includes a discussion of what a “romantic cohabitation” can mean when used in a spousal agreement according to a recent case, and how this could affect the drafting of divorce settlement agreements.
• New Jersey criminal lawyer John Marshall made numerous posts to his New Jersey DWI Lawyer Blog, including this timely alert about increased DWI enforcement around the time of the Labor Day weekend.
• Paul DioGuardi of Canadian tax litigators DioGuardi Tax was quoted in a Financial Post article on the Canadian Revenue Agency’s garnishee powers in respect of pensions.
• Addiction treatment center The Meadows posted a schedule of free lectures coming up throughout the fall in various cities across the US, Canada, and the UK.  The company also recently established their Meadows of Wickenburg account on Twitter.

As always, we’ll report back next month with news and highlights of Stem client activities.

After my recent swipes at case law updates and voice mail, you might think I’m just spending my time beating up on the weakest members of the lawyer communication fraternity. If so, today’s entry on news releases likely will confirm that line of thought. But what I’m really trying to do is isolate and attack a pernicious habit within law firms of all sizes: the phenomenon of rote communications, producing things simply because we’ve always produced them. Don’t get me wrong, though; I am quite interested in beating up on news releases.

My distaste for press releases stems from more than a decade of receiving them, in my former capacity as editor of three legal periodicals. I won’t get into the choice of medium — having been inundated by both repeated faxes and floods of email, it’s hard to choose between them, but I reserve a special place for the legal organization that (to this day) faxes announcements on legal-size paper. Nor will I get into press releases on topics entirely irrelevant to the recipient, press releases from people who’ve previously agreed to take you off their distribution list, or press releases with an invitation to an event taking place the next day in a different country. No, my fundamental problem with press releases is that I can’t recall ever receiving one of value to me.

A typical news release consists of a statement and three assumptions. The statement is “We are doing X.” The assumptions are, “X matters to you,” “You will rebroadcast news of X to your readers or listeners,” and “We will benefit in tangible ways from your dissemination of X.” Each of those assumptions is, in almost all cases, deeply flawed.

1. 1. “X matters to you.” Why do you think that? Have you asked me? Is this a personal and direct communication tailored to my publication? No, it’s not, because if it was, it wouldn’t be a press release, it would be a conversation. Press releases are one-sided announcements that bear little resemblance to reality: sales pitches, product descriptions, puffed-up expertise, the stuff you expect to see on the back of a box on a shelf. Why would you believe that would matter to me? “Because your readers are our potential customers” isn’t a reason.
2. “You will rebroadcast X.” Uh, no. Microsoft Outlook was the email system at my last job, and it came with a handy feature that briefly opened a small box on my screen when a new email arrived, telling me the sender and subject line. I got so I could glance at the screen and delete a news release before the little box even began to fade away. There are a few types of periodicals that either reprint a release in its entirety (celebrity wire services, techie blogs) or repackage it as reader fodder (community newspapers, political journalists). Most of the rest can find other sources of copy, thanks.
3. “We will benefit.” This is the assumption that really galls, because it represents a failure of communications strategy. Perhaps there are exceptions, but I’ve yet to come across any law firm that can tie the production of a press release or a succession of press releases to new business or improved profile. I’m not even sure that any but the largest and most sophisticated corporate entities could do so. I laugh when firms ask me what’s the ROI of blogs or Twitter: what’s the ROI of press releases? But because the investment on press releases is so small, no one really cares.

The problem, of course, is that the investment on a news release is small only for the sender. For the recipient(s), of whom there might be several thousand, the investment ranges from one second (in my case) to the time required to open or read a release and dispose of it; the attention costs are downloaded onto the receiver. The mass dissemination of unsolicited information that the recipient has to clean up goes by another a word these days: spam. If your law firm is sending spam, even (especially) to media organizations, please stop.

So that’s the beating-up part, and it’s easy and fun. The larger point is that news releases are only a symptom of a larger problem within law firms: rote communication, the habitual continuation of archaic methods of speaking to the public or to clients.

Most firms send press releases because they’ve always done so, dating back to a media era utterly different from today’s. Most firms create law firm newsletters because they’ve always done so, despite newsletters’ tenuous (at best) modern relationship with client service. Most firms place advertisements in magazines or seek interviews for their lawyers because that’s the way the firm has always built its profile — or at least, that’s what the firm believes. Measurable, concrete evidence of how law firm communications advance the firm’s business objectives is, in most cases, vanishingly rare. The exceptions, ironically, are social media, blogs, LinkedIn accounts, SEO and other new media tools whose reach is trackable and whose returns are traceable and verifiable (using press releases to boost your SEO is highly questionable, by the way, but that’s a story for another day).

How the world communicates has changed; how most law firms communicate has not. So the first step in carving out a rational, defensible communications strategy for a firm is to look at every single method of communication and ask: why are we doing this? What ends does it serve? If we stopped doing this tomorrow, what would happen? (Negatively and positively.) I used to make my colleagues at National nervous by asking my boss, every year or so, “Does the CBA still need a magazine?” The answer was always yes, on the merits: but I felt it was critically important that the question be seriously posed and carefully answered. Your firm deserves to have the same rigour applied to its own communications.

A lot of firms are looking hard at new forms of communication these days. My advice, before you begin, is to look hard at the old ones and get rid of those you can’t justify.

So, have you recently left a voice mail for someone under 30, never to have it returned or even acknowledged? A post at Legal Blog Watch might have the answer: it seems Millennials regard voice mails as unsolicited messages not much different than spam, and treat them accordingly. It’s an interesting idea, one I fact-checked with a friend in his 30s. His reply: “I’ve been known to let my voice mail sit for days. If it’s important, they’ll (a) call back or (b) email my BlackBerry, and I can respond from wherever I am.” It’s hard to argue with the sheer pragmatism of that approach.

The LBW post touched off a lengthy discussion in which many people talked about how much they dislike voice mail. Interestingly, though, most of the dislike was for receiving voice mails, the hassle of going through the endless series of commands only to get a short and often pointless message. Hardly anyone talked about whether they liked leaving voice mails. And that raises a question relevant to communication in law firms, one I’ve been pondering for a while. Here’s the question, one you can ask yourself: “As a general rule, if I’m phoning someone to give them information, am I happier to reach them in person or to to hear the click of the voice mail activating?”

It’s my theory that most lawyers fall into the second camp: we prefer to get the machine and to leave a message. If that’s correct — and I have no way to find out one way or the other, so I’d be interested in your answers — it would be consistent with a general reluctance by lawyers to engage in direct conversation. We’ve developed and refined a habit over the years of distancing ourselves from the person with whom we’re communicating. In the old days, we’d labour for hours over a finely crafted letter rather than speak to someone in person; more recently, the advent of email and voice mail and even texting has allowed us to happily delay and defer direct contact, keeping the other person at arm’s length.

This especially seems to be the case when the other person is a client. Many lawyers appear to dread lengthy, direct conversation with clients. I suppose some of it might be a reluctance to spend potentially billable time in mere conversation — although few lawyers are reluctant to bill clients for everything said over the phone between Hello and Goodbye. A better diagnosis, I think, is that lawyers distrust conversation, because conversations can’t be controlled.

An email says what you want it to say and nothing more, a voice mail can be rehearsed to perfection, and both can be deleted and restarted at the touch of a key or button. But once you’re on the phone (or as lawyers might say, “once the other person has you on the phone”), anything might happen, and matters could head in an unexpected direction. Lawyers love words and speech, but we insist that they remain under our firm control. Speech, however, like information, wants to be free, and it breaks out whether we like it or not.

I’ll grant you that this is a little esoteric. But I think there’s an important communications point here: lawyers who over-rely on canned conversations in emails and voice mail compromise their ability to communicate. And this doesn’t apply just to communication with clients, many of whom consistently complain that lawyers don’t communicate often enough or well enough. (If you really want to see a lawyer squirm, put them across the desk from a client and tell them to openly discuss the pricing and payment of bills.) It also applies internally.

How many young lawyers, of any generation, have returned to their office to find a thick file folder on their chair with a note saying, as Above The Law puts it, “Pls handle thx“? How many lawyers hear from senior partners by written memo more often than by spoken word? How many firms circulate news and policy by blast email rather than with a personal touch? (And by the way, consider the implications, for the receiver, of any kind of communication that comes with the adjective “blast.”) What kind of message do these tactics send? One that most lawyers take to heart and return in kind.

If some lawyers don’t listen to voice mail, maybe it’s not entirely a generational thing. Maybe it’s a tacit observation that if the information isn’t worth your time to personally give to me, it’s not worth my time to personally listen to it. And maybe that should be a message to lawyers of all ages: stop using communications technology as a crutch, or as a ten-foot-pole to keep people at bay. Take the time and make the effort to deliver questions and have conversations in person; if the person’s not there when you call, send an email asking them to call you. I think you’ll be pleasantly amazed at how much better communication becomes when we have the courage of our conversations.

Just a short note to say that Stem Legal’s official facebook home is moving to:

http://www.facebook.com/StemLegal

We’ve got a couple pages and groups that will be closed shortly, as we try to focus our efforts here.   Please drop by and consider giving us a ‘thumbs up’.

A couple days late, but Stem’s monthly client roundup is now ready to go.  Here are some of the highlights from July:

• West Palm Beach Criminal Lawyer Ron Chapman posted a series of articles on kidnapping: differentiating between what does and what does not constitute kidnapping, when a robbery also involves kidnapping, and another example of what does not constitute kidnapping.
• On the Arizona DUI Defense Blog at the Koplow Law Firm’s Arizona DUI Center, Lawrence Koplow wrote the first part in a series of articles discussing how a person can be guilty of DUI though not actually driving.
• Hissey Kientz LLP launched their new Mesothelioma Lawsuit Blog, covering news and legal commentary on developments in asbestos law and lawsuits involving mesothelioma. The firm also added a new section to its Mesothelioma Lawyer Hotline highlighting jobsites at which workers may have suffered asbestos exposure.
• Canadian law firm Gowlings once again placed well in Lexpert’s Canadian Legal Experts Directory, with 75 lawyers recognized across 37 practice areas in the 2010 edition. The firm was also recognized in several practice areas, including Computer & IT Law; Construction Law; Environmental Law; Labour Relations; Litigation – Corporate Commercial; Mining; Property Development; Litigation – Intellectual Property; and Franchising Law.
• BC legal support services solution Dye & Durham kept the local BC legal community updated with a number of industry items, including posts about new civil and family law rules and forms.
• The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association has been busy preparing three corporate counsel workshops, all eligible for professional development accreditation hours, for the upcoming Canadian Legal Conference in Niagara.
• Strellis & Field elder law attorney Jonathan Rosenfeld posted several interesting articles on his Nursing Homes Abuse Blog, including one about how determining the type of fracture a person sustained can reveal if nursing home abuse is responsible. Over at his Bed Sore FAQs site, Mr. Rosenfeld discussed a jury award of $28 million in punitive damages in an elder abuse and wrongful death case involving a 79-year-old nursing home resident who died from an infected bedsore.
• Arizona family firm Nirenstein Garnice Soderquist PLC lawyer Alexander Nirenstein wrote on the firm’s Arizona Divorce & Family Law Blog about a recent case in which a judge ordered shared custody of a family pet, rather than taking the usual approach of treating it as family property, with an order of sale and division of proceeds in the event of dispute. On the firm’s Arizona Elder Law & Probate Litigation Blog, Carol Soderquist wrote about a case in which the Arizona Court of Appeals concluded that the State of Arizona may be civilly liable for the negligence of its contracted private agencies after the tragic death of a disabled adult in a care facility.
• Law practice management software Clio’s blog featured an article in which an Oregon firm describes how, after a search and consideration of a number of options, they concluded that Clio is the right choice for their firm.
• New Jersey criminal lawyer John Marshall posted numerous new articles on his New Jersey DWI Lawyer Blog, including this discussion of the differences bewteen drug DUI and drunk driving cases.
• Canadian tax litigators DioGuardi Tax have some new informational videos including a taxpayers survival guide one on Canadian back taxes.
• Senior fellow John Bradshaw of The Meadows was interviewed on the VoiceAmerica show Second Chances. A download of the interview is also available. The Meadows also released the program for its 2010 Annual Symposium, coming this October.

As always, we’ll watch for more client news, activities, and accomplishments; and report back in a month’s time.

The following is a roundup of recent web studies and adoption numbers that I’ve flagged in my web travels.  No guarantee this will be a weekly event, but it was time to try something different!

• Top 50 US Web properties in June  [comScore]
• Social Networking Adpotion Demographics: Women Eclipse Men [comScore]
• Google websites have the largest audience in Asia Pacific Region [comScore]
• UK Ecommerce: Two thirds of Internet User will buy ‘something’ online each month [eMarketer]
• Online Video Consumption: Longer formats (TV & Movies) on the Rise [eMarketer]
• How Consumers Research the Healthcare Profession [eMarketer]
  Note:  Lots of analogies for the legal industry – i.e. speaks to professional service marketing.
• Social Media Trends – Asia Pacific Webinar Download [Nielsen]
• Why Online Marketers Can’t Ignore Baby Boomer Generation [Nielsen]
• Millennials will make online sharing in networks a lifelong habit [Pew Internet]
• 2010 Mobile Access Adoption: Six in ten Americans go online wirelessly [Pew Internet]
• Cloud Computing Prediction: By 2020, we’ll live mostly in the cloud, and not on the desktop [Pew Internet]
• 2010 USC Annenberg Digital Future Study [Center for the Digital Future at the USC Annenberg]
  Notable numbers: “82% of Americans online”, “19 hours per week”.
  The money (& funny) quote: “0 percent of Americans would pay for Twitter“

Take a moment to consider that staple of law firm newsletters (and now blogs) everywhere: the case law update. You know it well — chances are you’ve written and published at least one during your career.

The purpose of the case law update, I think you’d agree, is to notify readers that a new court decision affects the law in some way relevant to those readers. It follows from that premise that what readers most want to know is how the decision changes the law in ways that affect them, n’est-ce pas? Yet, as we all know, your average case law update spends maybe two paragraphs describing the impact of the ruling and close to 10 or 12 paragraphs setting out the background facts, the arguments by counsel, the findings of the trial judge (with quotes) and the conclusions of any appellate decisions (also with quotes).

If this format sounds awfully familiar, it’s because it’s the same format we’ve all been using since first-year law school. It’s a case summary, and it’s designed to do only one thing: demonstrate how well we understood the situation facing the judge and how the judge disposed of it.  Even the structure dates from law school: state the facts, apply the law, and summarize the result (like the solution to a mystery novel) at the very end. Like most law school assignments, the case summary was meant to train us to be judges someday, and it had no relevance to anyone outside the classroom or courtroom.

If you publish these kinds of summaries in newsletters and blogs today, stop for a moment and ask yourself: why on earth would clients be interested in 90% of what you’ve put in there? Clients are interested in only one thing: how does this affect me and my interests? The facts, the law, the analytical process by which the result was achieved — these are catnip to lawyers, who live and breathe this stuff, but to clients they’re nothing but extraneous detail. Clients care about what’s inside the overnight courier bag; lawyers care about the route taken by the FedEx truck to get it there.

I’ve now spent the better part of 15 years listening to lawyers talk about themselves, in one form or another: interviewing them, writing about them, listening to their speeches, scanning their websites, reading their newsletters and blogs, and on and on. If that experience has left me with one question, it’s this: Who, exactly, are we talking to? The too-frequent answer is: ourselves. Our consistent failure to consider and address our audience before we communicate is one of the biggest impediments to our effectiveness.

It’s difficult to overstate how important this is. Among professionals, lawyers are almost unique in terms of how much we communicate — almost all our work product is delivered verbally or in writing. But the habits we acquired at the start of our careers linger on like a bad cold — we instinctively address our communication to each other, rather than to the people whom we’re serving. There are of course plenty of notable and excellent exceptions, but as a general rule, we compromise our effectiveness as lawyers by forgetting who’s listening to us and why, and we compromise our marketing efforts by failing to consider who it is we hope will listen to us.

Communication — external and internal, deliberate and accidental, in service delivery and in marketing — is something to which we need to pay a lot more attention, and it’s something I’m going to address frequently here at the Law Firm Web Strategy blog in the months to come. For the moment, though, all I’d ask is that the next time you write a case law update for your firm, pause … re-read it … and ask yourself:  who will read this, and why should they care? Answering those two questions, and adapting what you’ve written accordingly, will instantly raise your game ahead of those of many competitors.

[cross-posted at Slaw.ca]

To date, LinkedIn has only offered a handful of sidebar applications that users can install.  They’ve been very picky, and only a few are aligned with vertical industries. Even then, it’s obvious that industry apps must have a broader application and be applicable to the general business community.  Late last night, the rollout began for Legal Updates on LinkedIn and it’s a huge win for my friends at JD Supra.

I’ve written about JD Supra before, so I won’t spell out their core offering for law firms.  They are, however, a company that’s been built around constructing web-based channels for content delivery.  With 70 million business members, the embedding of JD Supra functionality into LinkedIn – not sure how else to describe it, it’s quite seamless -  has to be their biggest win yet.  Looking at past partnering, and the LinkedIn effect for companies like Slideshare and Tripit, the future must seem limitless in San Francisco this morning!

I’m going to offer a bullet point summary below, but I’d like to point out Bob Ambrogi’s post this morning. It’s a thorough review, complete with screen shots.

Here’s my ‘reader’s digest’ summary, including some notes from the preview Jordan Furlong and I had on Monday:

• JD Supra and LinkedIn accounts are tethered – you can upload and distribute from either location.
• Without any promotion last night, signups were rolling in fast. This is going to be big.
• You can display your JD Supra collection on your LinkedIn profile for free.
• It’s also free to follow the content of others, and sharing your documents within your network’s homepage update stream.
• Distributing documents towards targeted professional groups across LinkedIn costs: $75/mo.  Account upgrades are possible in LinkedIn or on JD Supra.
• Current premium accounts at JD Supra will be grandfathered, and distribution included at current pricing.
• The Legal Updates application smartly uses the meta-data from both websites – so content is automatically matched to users by industry or profession.
• LinkedIn looks like it might target more vertical industries in future.
• It’s an exclusive arrangement. So this will be the only searchable, browsable repository of legal information on LI.
• With 70M LI users available, JD Supra is likely the largest legal content distribution network.

We’ve heard endlessly (more than once from me) about the imminent death of newspapers, the collapse of a once-great industry and business model, etc. and the correspondent rise in the power of social media. No one will dispute that news organizations are having a very difficult time adjusting to the post-internet economy, and I’ve written here about the increasing significance of blogs, Twitter and other new platforms.

Nonetheless, law firms (like other corporate entities) still strive for just a mention of the firm or its lawyers in a “major newspaper” or “national magazine.” I spent ten years editing an actual “National magazine” at the Canadian Bar Association, and I was struck by how much lawyers and law firms wanted to appear in its pages. PR agencies would constantly propose lawyers as interview subjects, and large national firms would ask for PDFs of an article featuring their lawyers to post on their websites. They clearly perceived some value or prestige arising from a mention in the magazine — even more so, I’m sure, in the Globe & Mail or National Post. But is the perception accurate? I’m not sure enough law firms ask themselves this.

Media appearances have long been considered a self-evidently valuable marketing effort. But just like any other such effort, they still demand a degree of ROI examination. Most lawyers would say they want the value arising from the imprimatur of legitimacy and respect that a media outlet bestows — “we were quoted in The New York Times!” And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of power still invested in these legacy media brands that can make them powerful players in this new landscape. But from law firms’ point of view, “major media mentions,” in isolation, can’t automatically be assumed to have an effect on a law firm’s brand and business development. They need to serve a purpose.

I was often tempted to ask the law firm marketing professionals seeking an appearance in National: “You do know that only other lawyers read this magazine, right?” Because it sometimes seemed to me they were investing a lot of time and effort in getting their lawyers in front of their competitors rather than their clients. They might have had good strategic reasons; for example, a firm’s repeated appearance in a nationwide legal periodical could translate into recruitment and lateral hiring advantages. But just as often, I suspect, a request to profile or interview a particular partner was driven by that partner’s combination of ego and influence.

All of which is to say: before setting out to get you or your firm into any kind of media outlet, be certain why you’re doing it and what you hope to get out of it. Brand management, profile enhancement, business development, referral generation, expertise demonstration — these are all valid reasons for pursuing media exposure, but most won’t apply in every situation. Be strategic in your choice of media placement, just as you should be with every other marketing choice. For example:

• If you run a small family law practice in New Brunswick, will you get more value from a mention in the Globe & Mail or in the Fredericton Gleaner? The answer depends on whether you want a prestige injection or a business development opportunity.
• If you run a civil litigation firm in Montreal, do you want to be profiled in Canadian Lawyer or in the Montreal Gazette? The answer depends on whether you want referrals from other lawyers or higher profile within your local business community.
• If you own a full-service firm in Edmonton with a smaller Calgary office, do you need attention from the Edmonton Journal or the Calgary Herald? The answer depends on whether you want to strengthen your headquarters or develop your satellite.

Before setting out on media placement efforts, lawyers and firms need to ask themselves: where do we want to show up, what do we want to be noted for, and why? Answering those questions correctly will greatly amplify the effectiveness of those efforts.

Ask anyone involved in legal marketing, and they’ve probably been face-to-face with a lawyer who insists on using bad fonts.  Last night it wasn’t a lawyer making this kind of bad choice, it was the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team.

His mistake wasn’t a mild one.  It wasn’t a bad call between sans serif or serif, or even an overly conservative fixation on Times New Roman.  No, instead  Mr. Gilbert’s choice was the ever mockable Comic Sans.  The design pundits on Twitter were chuckling about it so much, CNN was compelled to cover the story. Really. Over a font choice!

It’s a mild-wakeup call for all of us.  Not in terms of a potential embarrassment like this, but rather to reconsider the impression that different type face choices can make.  That while some font choices support the credibility of the writer, making the wrong one – Comic Sans topping that list – can do real damage to the message.  Need a refresher?  Check out the website Typography for Lawyers.  I can’t say I agree 100% with the advice, but a lot of it I do.

I’d also like to add a couple of my own tips:

1. Establish management buy-in first. Who stands up to the Partner that wants to choose their own font?  Or worse, wants to choose a new font every month? If the answer is ‘who cares…’, don’t bother investing your time creating standards.
2. When possible, however, creating approved firm standards for font face style & typography can help. Embedding those standards into printed work, forms production, templates, etc. can save a lot of headaches. It can also reduce internal bickering; and support those individuals tasked with maintaining consistent application.
3. For firms with a visual identity guide or style guide, be sure to include these font & typography standards. Define the font face usage not only in print materials, but also in digital placements. What are the acceptable line heights, kerning (space between letters)?
4. Delete Comic Sans off of every new workstation your firm purchases.  Nip those unsightly system fonts before they cause problems! :)

My newest column was published at Slaw.ca today, titled: Injection Marketing Undermines Credibility.  Within this piece, I’m trying to deliver two central messages.  The first is pretty straight forward: that embedding  links or messages about your services within web conversations is not only ‘tacky’, but it reflects terribly on you and your business.

For the generations of lawyers who’ve spent the better portion of their lives absorbing marketing and advertising, especially via unidirectional channels such as television, there’s a real need to disconnect from that experience.  Those who grasp the concept of “paying it forward” early (think altruism, educating, and connecting) will most often develop a large and mature network of web-based relationships. Those that don’t…  are destined to invest hours into the tools, and gain little traction.

Point being? If you’re not obtaining new relationships with your web marketing efforts, it may be time to work a little harder on ‘outreach’; and ease off on the frequency (and intensity) of your marketing message.  Relationships are the number one objective for your marketing success online; which brings me to the second central message of the column, SEO without spam.

Great SEO is dependent on these relationships, especially relationships with other online publishers. Let me spell it out in SEO terms:

• a large social network translates into reciprocal linking (linking to and from others in your online social circle) ;
• that network of links will grow in size boosting your link popularity (Google PageRank, and the like);
• link networks are not only valuable when in sizable number, but also in terms of domain diversity (not the same people always linking in – new relationships help shape this diversity);
• websites that link in based on similar topic coverage are better aligned and authentic (also valued by the search engines);
• similar subject websites also generate links within the body of the page’s text (valued more by the search engines, compared to blogroll links or footer links).

Websites that are really great performers in the search engines – call it ‘link juice’, call it what you will,  have this kind of link network behind them. On-page SEO tactics aside, the real “silver bullet” to SEO rankings is relationships.  Kill those, and you kill your SEO potential.

Unsolicited (or unexpected) commercial messages (a.k.a. spam) kills marketing – good SEO & credibility are just the first casualties. Fortunately the answer is very simple: hang out your shingle and do your business on your website. If your web travels take you elsewhere…  be yourself, be professional, and leave the salesman at home.

June has been another busy month for Stem clients, with some noteworthy accomplishments. Here are some highlights:

Following on earlier posts about Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for law firms, this entry will look at the last of the Big Four social media tools, blogs. In all the recent excitement over the three famous brand options, we sometimes forget that blogs started it all; equally, we can confidently predict that if unforeseen disasters were to befall social networking, blogs would be the last ones standing. As before, this post will look at the use of blogs in the enterprise context, for firms in general rather than for individual lawyers. That’s an important distinction for all these tools, but especially for blogs.

I wrote about law firm blogging 2 1/2 years ago, at Law21, and my opinion at that time was that blogs were a mediocre fit for law firms (as opposed to the lawyers inside them):

Blogs are the perfect vehicle of modern lawyer branding. If every lawyer in the country started a blog, each would be as unique as that lawyer’s fingerprint. An individual lawyer can, through her blog, show herself to be, yes, smart, expert and thoughtful, but even more importantly, memorable, personal, unique — all the things to which people are attracted, and precisely those things that a law firm cannot be. Firms are things; lawyers are people — and clients prefer people.

I still think that the benefits of blogging tend to accrue to the blogging lawyer more than to the firm where he or she works, and that a lawyer’s voice and personality are the key elements of a truly successful blog. But I’m no longer prepared to say that a law firm can’t use blogs as effective marketing and communication tools. My opinion has evolved because both blogs and the profession have evolved since then too.

Blogs have evolved mostly by becoming so plentiful, even borderline ubiquitous. The ABA Journal‘s Blawg Directory recently added the 3,000th law blog to its roll, while Kevin O’Keefe reported in March that 96 of the AmLaw 200 had blogs, a 149% increase since August 2007. Over at Stem’s Lawblogs.ca, the number of Canadian legal blogs has surpassed 200. Statistically if by no other measure, blogs have become sufficiently widespread at law firms that a watershed moment is at hand: firms will shortly be asked why they don’t have blogs rather than why they do.

As blogs become more common and accepted, they also become regarded as just another communication and marketing tool, perhaps even a conventional one. I’d argue that this has been a negative development for blogs, in terms of quality: being grouped with routine legal alerts, bland newsletters and self-serving press releases has lowered the bar for what blogs can be, risking a concomitant lowering of our expectations and standards for them. But the fact remains, these blogs do exist and they are being read, and that should be neither denied nor lightly dismissed.

Equally, it has to be acknowledged that law firms have evolved more quickly, in their use and appreciation of blogs, than I would’ve figured in 2008. Granted, many law firm blogs still leave a great deal to be desired. Some bloggers seem to think they’re still in law school, publishing lengthy case summaries of recent decisions that would bore lawyers, let alone clients, who happened upon them. Some are clearly doing nothing more than feeding the SEO monster — you can recognize the “keyword phrases” they’ve been directed to sprinkle liberally throughout the text. And still others evidently feel unsure about just what they’re doing with a blog, or hesitant to move outside a narrow zone of safe and predictable content.

But for all that, the quality of many law blogs, even at well-known regional and national firms, surpasses what I would have expected. That’s a credit to the bloggers, who found their own voices and the confidence to use them, and to their firms, which have relinquished enough control over the process that a lawyer can blog without looking over his or her shoulder. Clients are starting to notice as well, as one survey suggests in-house counsel take blogs into consideration in choosing law firms (though it’s also worth noting that blogs have their limits in this regard).

So I’m now prepared to say that yes, a law firm can use blogs effectively as a modern marketing, communications and branding tool — especially since blogs also function very effectively as “conversation starters” in the other three social media networks. But firms still need to follow some rules if they want to continue to extract value from blogs and increase that value over time. Here are some of my recommendations about how a law firm can blog effectively; I’d invite you to add your own in the comments section.

1. Publish numerous blogs. Unless your firm is exceptionally small and focused, you should publish several blogs simultaneously. The reason should be clear: does your firm only offer one type of legal practice? If not, then why would you offer only one blog to the world? You should run as many blogs as you have (a) practice areas you want to support and (b) lawyers willing and able to offer that support. Larger firms should have a blog for every practice group of any consequence. Reed Smith has 12 blogs, from employment and real estate law to life sciences and media and entertainment in China, all professionally branded. Womble Carlyle, a substantially smaller firm, has no fewer than 18 blogs, including super-niche categories like supply chain and furniture law. If it’s possible for a law firm to have too many blogs, I haven’t seen it yet.

2. Brand the blogs as yours. Some of the best and most widely read lawyer blogs out there are written by lawyers who work for mid-size and larger firms, but you’d never know it to glance at the blogs themselves. They operate on free platforms like Blogspot and WordPress, and you need to look hard to find the name of the author’s firm or its logo anywhere on the site. I can understand how this situation comes about — the lawyer doesn’t want to (or can’t) get the firm’s approval to blog, or the firm wants to maintain its distance from and deniability regarding the blog. So the blog lives in a netherworld, building up the lawyer’s profile and expertise without channeling those benefits to the firm. And what happens if the blogging lawyer leaves the firm, as he or she often does? The blog and its advantages go with the lawyer, and the firm is left with nothing. Take pride of ownership in your lawyers’ blogs, support them, own the domains in which they’re published, and insist they be brought into the firm’s marketing sphere (but see also entry #4, below).

3. Maintain a deep bench. As just noted, law firms whose lawyers blog (even if they blog under the firm banner) run the risk that if the lawyer goes, so does the blog and its branding benefits. Accordingly, every blog should have a multitude of active contributors. The main reason is that if one blogger defects, several remain to fill the gap — the analogy I use is Saturday Night Live, which keeps losing stars to Hollywood (from Chevy Chase through Eddie Murphy and Will Ferrell), yet keeps going because the ensemble cast stays behind and supports the brand. But there are other reasons: for one thing, more names and faces in the Author column support the idea that this really is a firm blog, not a one-lawyer project. And blogs are an easy and effective marketing development tool for new lawyers who rarely get other opportunities to establish a public presence and who are usually already comfortable with the medium. Check out Pitblado LLP’s Pitblawg for a good example of an author ensemble.

4. Let your people go. The one thing about law firm blogs in 2010 that has most pleasantly surprised me is the emergence of lawyers’ true voices and personalities in their blogs. I had expected, reasonably enough, that a combination of overt pressure from senior partners and self-censorship by nervous lawyers would render most such blogs a whiter shade of bland. But blogs become popular precisely because their authors are informal and accessible in their tone, when you get the sense that they have freedom to express their opinions (obviously within reason) and demonstrate a wider range of personality and interest than a website biography can reveal. Firms owe it to themselves and their lawyers not to muzzle these blogs or modify these voices — this is how more and more branding and business development will be done in the years to come, lawyer-driven rather than firm-driven. By all means, prepare policies and codes of conduct to guide your lawyers and temper their enthusiasm where appropriate; but otherwise, let your people go.

I was speaking with the 80-year-old (and still active) founder of a mid-size firm the other day, and one of the things he mentioned was that he wants to start up a law blog himself. Not only do I think that’s terrific in and of itself, it’s a great example for every other law firm out there to let down their guard and embrace what blogs offer. Law firm blogs are the natural successors to and improvement upon law firm newsletters, which have long since lost their power. In ten years, if not sooner, they’ll be utterly unremarkable on the law firm landscape. Your firm shouldn’t wait that long.

Of all the social networks, I remain enamoured with Twitter the most. Its simplicity makes it extremely versatile, both for content distribution and relationship building. I also think it delivers value at a personal level and at the same time can represent brands and businesses.

But one place where Twitter drives me crazy, and has for the past 3+ years,  is the lack of systems reliability –  a.k.a. the ‘fail whale’ which displays whenever Twitter has exceeded user capacity. If you’ve used Twitter for any period, you not only know what the fail whale is, but expect it to appear! It has become an accepted part of the Twitter experience.

Will they fix it?  It’s hard to imagine they will, and if a serious effort is being made, it must be a long term project.  The company is now extremely focused on making money, “Promoted Tweets”, and the like.  Desperately trying to show they have a business model.  Which is all well and good, but shouldn’t the technology itself be rock solid? If the plan is to take the company public, you’d think the delivery technology would at least be an equal priority.

Twitter’s fail whale teaches us that mediocre technology is ok.  As I said above, we expect routine systems failure from Twitter. And it’s sad. The days when we would ask of web companies ‘how solid is their technology?‘ or ‘does it scale?‘ seem to be over.  If you can create a cool web application, and it works 98% of the time… that’s probably good enough.

And the worst part? I unfortunately and admittedly no longer care. I accept that there will be days when I must refresh the browser window 5 or 6 times, or shut down Tweetdeck and try again in 5 minutes (somewhere, an Engineer dies a little inside because of users like me).

Twitter’s problems won’t arise because of Users though. Really. It’s not my company, so mediocre and good enough aren’t my concern. Investors, on the other hand might eventually decide to nitpick. Perhaps not now, and maybe not even at the IPO, but eventually. Twitter is going to have to compete.

Frankly, it’s a bad call on Twitter’s part not to remedy this situation early and take this unreliability out of the investor equation. It will eventually burn them, because no company is a market darling forever.

Stem clients have been very busy again this month, with some significant achievements and honours. Here are some highlights:

• Canadian law firm Gowlings received a number of accolades this month, including being selected Law Firm Website of the Month by Precedent Magazine and receiving the Copyright Case of the Year award for its involvement in the recent satellite radio royalties case at the Canadian Copyright Board.
• Gowlings lawyers were also recognized in the press recently. Robin D. Walker, Q.C. received the Murray Klein Award from the Ontario Bar Association for excellence in insolvency law; securities litigation head Kelley McKinnon appeared on two television networks to discuss the federal government’s proposed national securities regulatory authority, and Henry Brown and Jacques Shore of the government relations practice were quoted in National Magazine on new lobbyist conduct enforcement guidelines.
• Strellis & Field elder law attorney Jonathan Rosenfeld launched a substantial new Resource Center to accompany his Bed Sore FAQ site. The new Resource Center includes a new section on bed sore injury articles,a detailed glossary of bed sore terms, and a new National US Directory of medical providers arranged in State-by-State collections.
• Simultaneously, Mr. Rosenfeld and his firm Strellis & Field launched a new practice group dedicated to Bed Sore Injuries.
• Arizona family firm Nirenstein Garnice Soderquist PLC launched its newly-redesigned website, with informative descriptions of its practices and easy navigation around the site.
• Alexander Nirenstein of Nirenstein Garnice Soderquist PLC summarized recent Arizona legislation affecting divorce and child custody law and discussed how bankruptcy won’t relieve a spouse or parent from paying alimony or child support on the Arizona Divorce & Family Law Blog.
• Law practice software Clio launched its completely revised Clio help and support site, rich with informative, interactive and multimedia features.
• At the West Palm Beach Criminal Lawyer Blog, Ron Chapman listed and provided links to 20 websites that contain useful and interesting federal, Florida, and general legal reference information.
• Michael Myers of  McClanahan Myers Espey represented families of deceased employees in the Florida Supreme Court this month. Arguments were heard about whether the families have the right to sue to recover benefits paid to the employers under Corporate Owned Life Insurance (COLI) policies.
• Hissey Kientz LLP continue to develop its legal document databases, with issues including: Asbestos lawsuits, the Fentanyl-Duragesic Pain Patch, and Hormone Replacement Therapy.
• Koplow Law Firm launched a brand new re-design for its Arizona DUI Center website.
• Canadian tax litigators DioGuardi Tax launched a new video to their Youtube channel on filing Back Taxes in Canada. The video discusses CRA’s voluntary disclosure program (VDP) and the lack of lawyer-client protection.
• BC legal support services solution Dye & Durham continues to cover local legal news on their BC Law Watch blog, including an upcoming webinar on the BC Family Law rule changes.
• New Jersey criminal lawyer John Marshall published part two of “What Every Driver Should Know If Stopped for Drunk Driving“.
• Mr. Marshall also discussed his firm’s successful strategy in Central Judicial Processing in Superior Court in Newark to obtain a dismissal of one of the charges against their client and a consequent release on his own recognizance rather than bail.
• The Canadian Corporate Counsel Association released the summer edition of CCCA Magazine.
• Staff of The Meadows Addiction Treatment Center will be speaking at or hosting several upcoming events and retreats, including a sold-out lecture this week.

As always, we’ll be back in a month to share more client accomplishments, news, and events.