« January 08, 2006 - January 14, 2006 | Main | January 22, 2006 - January 28, 2006 »
January 21, 2006
Dial 'H' For 'Human': "Thank you for the opportunity to offer you excellent customer service. Please listen carefully to the following options as our menu has changed...."
Here's a sign of the service times. It's a Newsweek blurb from the upcoming January 23 issue on getting "live" customer service. A guy who apparently just wouldn't take it any more did something as productive as anyone could. I'll bet that several young couples name their next born son after a Winchester, Mass. man named Paul English.
Posted by JD Hull at 11:15 PM | Comments (0)
Law Firm Logos are Goofy, Useless, and a Waste of Time and Money.
At some point I'll reveal how I really feel about law firm logos. For the time being, Tom Kane in The Legal Marketing Blog has a nice recent post about firm logos. I agree that quality service and not logos should be the main event, as Tom and others say. And I would add that if you have a logo, don't change it--but if you don't have a logo, don't bother to develop one. Logos are really about your "look". Whether you know it or not, your firm already has this "look".
Your "look" is on your stationery/letterhead, envelopes and (if they match), your business cards. These all have your firm's name on it. Hopefully, these same patterns, lettering, and colors are reproduced on your marketing materials: website, brochure, blog. When people see Hull McGuire PC, usually underlined in burgundy with black Gothic lettering on pastel-colored stationery or business cards, that's us--our trade dress and our "look". Clients, agencies, courts, and contacts have been seeing it for 12 years. The repetition does it, and it likely has value. We wouldn't change that look even if we decided we didn't like it.*
A great example of repetition yielding recognizability and therefore value is the Yahoo! home page (and in fairness, I likely got this idea from Harry Beckwith's writing). First, forget about the easily recognizable Yahoo! logo for a moment (Yahoo!, Google, IBM and Coca-Cola have logos--but they've spent millions on them). Then go to the Yahoo! home page. It's very basic--even boring--but Yahoo! has stuck with it because people recognize it through repetition of the format you see when you open the page. To me, that consistency is bracing, reassuring. And, originally intended or not, it has value. Yahoo! knows the "look" of its home page is basic and boring, it can certainly afford to develop a new one, and it wouldn't change for the world.
* Besides, "HMPC" sounds more like a fuel additive than a symbol of quality legal care.
Posted by JD Hull at 08:47 AM | Comments (0)
January 20, 2006
Paul Caron, Assault of The Tax People & "The Top 10 Tax Stories of 2005".
I'm not one of them. But our law firm has several fine and very hard-working corporate tax and transactional lawyers. The tax people--Julie, Tom, Janet and Al--are curious and amused about this What About Clients? blog I've been writing since August 2005. Don't get me wrong. They're supportive (especially Tom). I am their friend, partner, co-worker--but I'm also a litigator and lobbyist who has lots of noisy, ambitious and aggressive friends and contacts--and not too many of them are tax or M&A people. My friends are mostly litigators/barristers, GCs, entrepreneurs, journalists, company officers, politicians, Congressional staffers and a few environmental and IP people.
But I'm here to tell my tax lawyer friends and co-workers that apparently there are lots of tax blawgs. And there's at least one that's well-written enough so that even I can understand it. It's edgy and funny, too. Nearly two years ago Paul Caron, a tax law professor at the University of Cincinnati Law School, launched TaxProf Blog. Tax profs from several fine law schools regularly contribute to it. The Wall Street Journal has called it a "must-read blog", and it's actually fun to read. Earlier this month, TaxProf Blog had a great post on the Top Ten Tax Stories of 2005. Near the end of that post, there are links to nineteen (19) tax blogs--10 by practitioners, 7 by professors and 2 by think tanks on tax policy. Nineteen.
Posted by JD Hull at 06:11 PM | Comments (0)
January 18, 2006
Compete on Service--Don't Reduce Your Fees (Or You'll "Be Hating Life").
Both Ed Poll at LawBiz Blog and Jonathan Stein at The Practice have had good recent posts (respectively, here and here) on this subject. Unless it's a trade-off for volume work for a client you've worked with before, I am a believer in the idea you should not reduce your fees. Compete on service--not price. While I've posted on this before, I like Ed's and Jonathan's slightly different takes (for different types of clients) on this topic better than anything I've said on it previously.
The primary reason, for me: if clients come to you for price, they will leave you for price. And if you think about it, would-be clients who negotiate or haggle about price are not likely to know the difference between quality lawyering and "just going through the motions" anyway. They are out there in droves--well-meaning but unsophisticated users of legal services, both businesses and individuals, who think all lawyers are the same and doing the same fungible cookie-cutter stuff every day. These clients don't appreciate any lawyer; they don't and won't ever get it. If one becomes your client, very quickly you--as a popular Washington DC disc jockey used to say--will "be hating life".
Posted by JD Hull at 02:12 PM | Comments (0)