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The Official Blog of Martindale-Hubbell
Welcome to the Martindale-Hubbell and LexisNexis Client Development Solutions blog. Read blog post and view comments on the official Martindale-Hubbell website.
We recently completed analysis on firms that who publish lawyer photos on martindale.com and lawyers.com. Our research showed that firms who publish photos have 33 percent more clickthroughs to their Web sites and 17 percent more e-mails sent to them through their listings.
These findings underscore the importance of personalizing your firm’s Martindale-Hubbell listing with lawyer photos, a firm logo and other content that will engage potential customers and help
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At NITA's two-week trial advocacy boot camp in Louisville, Colorado, I gained enormous respect for trial lawyers. I thought my skills in client development would translate easily. I was wrong.
The best analogy I can come up with for the difference is like being an expert at checkers and then making the move to chess. It’s exponentially more complicated, but tons more fun.
In fact, I think the parallels between legal marketing and trial ad
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During the past few weeks I sampled subscribing firms' activity on Martindale.com and Lawyers.com. What did I find? There can be a distinct difference in the amount of profile views, leads and click-throughs firms receive based on the data and content they provide about their firm and practicing attorneys.
There are solo practitioners who receive hundreds of page views and click-thr
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Law firm marketers recognise the importance of demonstrating the value and ROI of marketing expenditure to their firm's executive committee; however, attributing business development success to specific activities is more easily said than done.
Subscribing international firms have in the past presented us with a similar challenge – to demonstrate what success martindale.com has had in achieving electronic visibility across local language s
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Last week, I attended my first Legal Marketing Association (LMA) event, their annual Summer Soiree in New York. During the evening, I spoke with a senior business development professional at a very large global law firm that is not a Martindale subscriber. While I was describing my role, she asked me a question to the effect of “Do you put the information in the books online?”
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A few days ago I read a small piece on Thomas Edison . It is interesting how many inventions he was responsible for -- the light bulb, obviously, the phonograph and the motion picture camera, just to name a few. With all of the great inventions, there were also many failures; Edison patented more than 1,000 inventions. In response to his failures, he was quoted as saying “Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! If I find 10
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What do small law firms -- anywhere from 1 to 20 lawyers -- do to drum up new business? Martindale-Hubbell has been asking that question regularly, and the latest data reveal some fascinating trends. At our request, Harris Interactive conducted a survey similar to the ones we did in 2002 and 2005. This gives us a good look at what's working, what's changing, and who's spending what.
What we have learned is supported by our own customers' product requirements. Like the firms in the sur
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Is your Martindale-Hubbell listing doing all it can to drive client contacts? Here are some strategies for getting maximum value from your subscription. These come from best practices we have found for our customers:
- Lawyer Photos & Firm Logo – Personalizes your firm to users.
- Phone Numbers – Add for ALL offices & lawyers. Don’t make it hard for prospective clients to contact you.
- Email Addresses - Add for
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I posted the following response to Robert Ambrogi's thoughtful post about relationship-building for lawyers and wanted to continue the conversation here:
You raise a great point about rainmakers and networking. When it comes right down to it, personal relationships, well cultivated over time, will always pay off over the long run.
My experience is that historically
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Hi, I’m Brian Salmanowitz, the Product Development Director for the Martindale-Hubbell web sites. I lead the group of developers that builds martindale.com, lawyers.com and attorneys.com. I have been in this role since January 2007 and previously directed the development efforts for Martindale’s self-service, ratings, content and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.
I plan to blog on a variety of topics from my web development background (i.e. development pr
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You’ve probably read about or noticed the LinkedIn integration we've launched on martindale.com. At the same time, we also released a new feature on the lawyer, office and law firm profile pages - Visibility Rankings.
Users o
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There have been a lot of questions and buzz this year about online networking for attorneys. Is it needed? Do attorneys use it? Will they? What is really needed? Yet there really hasn’t been much objective data out there to help answer such questions. Until now. Results of a recent Networks for Counsel survey by Leader Networks demonstrate that attorneys are finding it difficult to maintain and build their networks by tradit
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Some of you may have noticed a change at martindale.com recently. Specifically, that we've added LinkedIn connections within the attorney and law firm profiles.
In fact, some of you are talking about it online at several popular legal blogs such as The Legal Water Cooler and Legal Blog Watch.
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Hello! I'm Laxmi Stebbins Wordham, and I'm a Vice President at Martindale-Hubbell. I work with several teams of great people to develop strategy, oversee execution and make sure we keep growing and improving. As a new blogger, I hope to start and encourage thoughtful conversations about how we can make our products better.
Within the larger LexisNexis world, I function as the business owner for a group of our products in the B2B space, such as www.m
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Martindale-Hubbell is in transition, as many of you know. Indeed, this blog is one part of our ongoing work to serve the needs of the legal industry in the Web 2.0 era. We were pleased to note this week that the ABA Journal took notice of our efforts in an article titled "Martindale morphs."
Do you think we are on the right track? What changes should we make next? What's working for you, and what
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Just as a business balances its investments between product and sales, so must a lawyer balance his or her time between the practice of law and client development efforts.
I’m reminded today as I return to the practice of law just how different the legal profession is from the business world. Although lawyers might have people around to help, ultimately they are both the product and the sales team. In the business world, there is a much more distinct difference between those
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I’ve always wanted to be trial lawyer. But in college at the University of Chicago and then law school there, I studied economics and developed a love for business. So when I started practicing law at Sidley Austin, I did transactional work. Some of the most interesting people I met in my practice were entrepreneurs. So, I left Sidley to help start, grow and then sell a company to LexisNexis. After running that company -- InterAction -- for a few
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A while back I read Larry Bodine’s article in Law Technology News titled “Social Networking – Crowded but silent”.
Larry covers well the challenge we face in any social or professional networking system – whether it’s online or offline – what’s in it for the participants? MySpace an
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The User-Generated Content & Social Media Committee of The Interactive Advertising Bureau published a great introduction to user generated content (UGC). While the article focuses on helping advertising agencies and "brands" understand the potential and risk of advertising in this new environment, I think there's a lot that law firms, lawyers, and other legal profe
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I guess it’s all in who you ask.
Within LexisNexis I get involved in this discussion a lot these days. For some time we have been working on enhancing our attorney ratings to make them more comprehensive and useful to the consumer of legal services – from corporate counsel to consumer. Over the past year we have spoken to many members corporate counsel and they have consistently said that they wo
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Thanks all of you out there for your feedback on our blog over the past few weeks. Despite its shortcomings, we would never have been able to engage with you and get all of your great (and free) advice and suggestions on our b
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I've spent the last few weeks on the road visiting with various corporate legal departments. The pressure on corporate counsel to control costs is as intense as ever. That's not new.
What I found interesting was the amount of legal work -- like real trial work -- that is moving in-house to help keep costs down. If this trend continues, I imagine that one of the four scenarios for the Legal Profession set out in last month's Legal Transformation Study will come sooner than later.
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One of the first programs I ever used on a computer was CalcStar, a companion program to that predecessor to WordPerfect called WordStar. I used CalcStar to manage my checkbook. I remember migrating my data from CalcStar into what is now called Quicken. After I made that change, my wife finally started to use our computer to manage our checkbook.
What does this have to do with Professional Net
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Larry Bodine’s article in the recent Law Technology News, Crowded but Silent, underscores a fundamental fact in the world of online social media: What draws teenagers, bloggers, marketers, recruiters, evangelists, self-proclaimed evangelists and sales people (ahem, excuse me – business development prof
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It’s been about three months since we launched the Martindale-Hubbell blog. And, it has seen its fair share of criticism and feedback.
However, don’t blame Sami or Barry or anyone else here are Martindale-Hubbell for that.
Rather, as the director of pro
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Recently, Google has been testing a new enhancement to its web search service where it places a search box within the search results. I’m not sure if there is even an official name for it yet, but basically it places a search box below the top result and allows the Google user to search that site right from Google search results page, without having to navigate to the target site’s home page or use its search function. As pointed out i
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The Metropolitan Corporate Counsel Magazine interviewed my boss, Ralph Calistri, about the transformation of Martindale-Hubbell. It's nice that we're starting to see some positive things written about the dramatic changes we've been making.
I had a wonderful conversation recently with an extremely nice and smart blogger who is just as extreme in his criticism
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In an article called Hiring Lawyers by the Numbers Ursula Furi-Perry writes about the trend in corporate America for hiring decisions by outside counsel to be scrutinized by procurement officers. While these new policies are making lawyers both in-house and in private practice squirm and shudder, the real question is how to preserve the trusted relationship between corporate counsel and their outside lawyer in these c
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About a month ago I wrote about our plans to put all of our Law Digests onto martindale.com so if you register on our site you would be able to search for any digest you need.
I'm happy to report that we now have all 150 of our Law Digests loaded onto martindale.com. To find a Law Digest in a particular jurisdiction, ju
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Mark Lepper of Stanford University and Sheena Iyengar of Columbia University in a fascinating article titled “When Choice is Demotivating: Can One Desire Too Much of a Good Thing?” explain that buyers can end up worse off, less satisfied, and de-motivated when faced with too much choice.
The article describes three experiments where one group of people was offered many choices (over 20) whil
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