The last time I wrote a blog post for Three Geeks was in 2021. It was the height of COVID, and I had just hosted my first (and only) Clubhouse session. We were talking about the Billable Hour.
Clubhouse has since faded into the recesses of memory. COVID, thankfully, has too. But the billable hour
Whether you loved it or hated it… Season One of She-Hulk: Attorney at Law is in the books. And this also wraps up Season One of SuperHuman Law Division (SHLD) Podcast. We’ve enjoyed going through and spotting the legal and law firm issues and discussing them from both a lawyer’s perspective and a legal operations professional’s point of view.
We reached back out to local counsel this week and brought back Ashley Carlisle, Head of Marketing at HyperDraft to walk us through the legal topics of this specific episode, but also to put back on her marketing and business development hat and break down the good, the bad, and the downright ugly of GLK/H’s marketing strategy. Honestly, it was GLK/H’s lack of marketing strategy that really happened in this fictional MCU BigLaw firm.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to listen to our thoughts on the show. We’ll take a break and determine what we’ll talk about in a possible Season Two of SHLD. If you have suggestions, ping us at @SuperHumanPod on Twitter.
Stay Super Everyone!!
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Continue Reading What If… GLK/H Had A Great Marketing Team? (SHLD Ep. 9)
How successful have firms been in handling the stress of adjusting to the needs of the market, knowing how to present that message to clients, and understanding how a sustained firm culture plays a critical role in their ability to cope? Barbara Malin, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Jackson Walker, LLP, and Jennifer Johnson, CEO of Calibrate Legal discuss the critical role marketing, business development, and firm culture play in times of crisis. Our guests tackle some very tough questions about whether firms know and embody their culture and if cultural bias hampers their ability to succeed. They also highlight how firms have adjusted their business development plans to support clients in light of COVID and anti-racism movements.
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Spotify Are you feeling inspired this August? We certainly are. From identifying songbirds via neural networks to Deloitte Legal’s AI pro bono project in the UK to pornography suits in Martha’s Vineyard, we share our thoughts on the news of the week.
Please take the time to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Contact us anytime by tweeting us at @gebauerm or @glambert. Or, you can call The Geek in Review hotline at 713-487-7270 and leave us a message. You can email us at geekinreviewpodcast@gmail.com. As always, the great music you hear on the podcast is from Jerry David DeCicca.
Should law firms invest in more competitive intelligence? Asks Ron Friedmann. Um. Yes. Always 
yes. And not just law firms but every business should invest more in CI. Investing in knowing what you know, knowing what you don’t know and knowing what the market knows – about you and otherwise – is an investment every business should make. In the above mentioned article, CI is described as “The deeper the insight, the better. Competitive intelligence serves that purpose. It helps win business and improve service delivery.” The article goes on to talk about the ways CI can help law firm business development and marketing efforts, this post was expertly timed to come out in advance of the Legal Marketing Associations annual conference being held in Atlanta this coming week. The revisiting a February 2019 survey and calling for more CI is a great start, CI can help with business development.
But positioning CI only as BD and Marketing support sells CI short. CI can and should drive business development efforts but CI is much more. CI should be embedded in practice planning, strategic firm growth discussions, lateral hire diligence, office or practice expansion proposals. To borrow and expand on the SCIP.org definition of CI, it is a systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing, and managing external and internal information that can affects your business. There are a few key elements to that definition that get lost when we think of CI as only competitive research to support BD and marketing efforts. Namely, the idea of CI being based on analysis, and a combination of internal and external information gathering. The aforementioned competitive research leaves out rigorous analysis and negates internal data, which firms are producing in mass quantities and not leveraging very well beyond pricing or resource planning. We need to bring the outside in. if we are going to truly do meaningful CI for our firms. CI needs to be systematic, it needs to be ongoing not only tied to a specific RFP or a moment in time, it should evolve with the firm and inform any business decision that requires both avoiding surprises (the fall of a competitor firm, the exit of an entire practice of lawyers from your firm to a competitor) and forecasting for the future (did we see e-sports coming as a burgeoning area of law?).
Continue Reading More CI? That’s Axiomatic
Robert Ambrogi did me a kindness by including me in his post, The Year of Women in Legal Tech.
I’ve been working in legal technology before it was even a thing.
Over the past 20 years, the field of legal digital marketing has taken off and become a legitimate business need.
As the legal
Perhaps I’m one of the lucky few that has always had a good relationship with the Marketing Department. Although I am the incoming President of the American Association of Law Libraries, I am also a member of the Legal Marketing Association, and I find value in both. I have leveraged the relationships built by the
Following on up on my great experience this past week in Austin, TX at the Annual Legal Marketing Association Conference, I thought I would share my thoughts from a few weeks ago when I had a conversation with someone who is thinking of
getting into legal marketing. She’s had
a vibrant career in other industries
Last week the Twitterverse and other content spaces were abuzz (or atweet?), with commentary on the story from Bloomberg Law on how Law Firm Librarians Feel Underused and Underpaid. Many in the sector agreed or felt that it was a wake up call of some kind. The article was based on a survey compiled
If you’ve seen any concert festival posters over the past few years, you’ll notice that the bigger the band is, the bigger the font is. As I was thumbing through some of my reading yesterday, I saw an article on “Top 10 font size shockers from the Coachella 2015 lineup.” Some bands were
Part 2 of the The Legal Intelligencer’s ongoing series on Law Firm Competitive Intelligence came out on May 13th. The author, Gina Passarelli, makes a few points that, well, let’s just say I have a different perspective on.
Let’s start with the firms that were interviewed for this article. They are AMLAW100 firms with resources and budgets (personnel and