« March 05, 2006 - March 11, 2006 | Main | March 19, 2006 - March 25, 2006 »

March 16, 2006

More on the BTI Consulting Study.

It's right here from Law.Com and it follows our March 4 post "High-End Clients Not Happy at All" and great posts earlier this month by Gerry Riskin, Carolyn Elefant and Tom Kane.

Posted by JD Hull at 02:44 PM | Comments (0)

More On One that Matters: Should We Sell During Client Polling/Interviews?

Great post from Michelle Golden commenting on Jim Hassett's equally thoughtful one on whether or not "to sell" during interviews with clients about how they like your services. This continues the off-and-on 2 month long multi-blog forum on the topic with Lamb-Hassett-Golden-Kane-Hull. Forget about the right answer; the most important thing about the discussion is that it is Even Being Had. The overall questions posed by Michelle, Jim, Patrick Lamb, Tom Kane and me are: (1) Should professional service providers do client interviews? (2) If "yes", just how do we conduct them and use them? Who should conduct them, who should attend, what is their scope, do we sell during them (and what would "selling" be in this context, anyway?) and how do we most effectively follow-up the client/customer interviews? A good post to get your bearings on this discussion is one by Michelle Golden here.

Posted by JD Hull at 07:25 AM | Comments (0)

March 15, 2006

China Law Blog Has Made Some Great Posts Lately.

China Law Blog, a site based in both the U.S and China, has made some great posts lately commenting on China business news and regulatory developments, including reports on the slow but positive changes in Chinese IP enforcement policy. But for people just getting interested in doing business in China there's another interesting and practical CLB March 9 post called "Doing Business in China - A Good List of the Basics", by Dan Harris of Harris & Moure, which runs this great new site. Caution: Don't try to do business or law things in China without experienced "China hands".

Posted by JD Hull at 04:59 PM | Comments (0)

March 14, 2006

Do What You Love: Hero 3 - Mark Del Bianco

Speaking of our nation's capitol, I've posted about D.C.-based telecom and lawyer's lawyer Mark C. Del Bianco before, including here a couple of weeks ago. And see this article on "The Law of Telecom" which Mark and I wrote for The Pennsylvania Lawyer. Mark's another Renaissance guy and person-who-gets-it. I've known him for about 20 years, and he loves what he does for clients with legal tech issues.

Telecom issues are Everywhere and in Every Deal these days--and Mark figured that out long before it happened. So Del Bianco became a telecommunications law brand--and yet people want to work with him in other areas where his experience and expertise is both broad and deep. If you practice law long enough, and love it the way he does, that will happen: antitrust law (he's also Vice Chair of the Computers and Internet Committee of the ABA's Antitrust Section), foreign trade law (he used to edit the Yale Journal of International Law) and even litigation (DOJ trained him a long time ago). And anything to do with that exciting yet inscrutable new point where the law intersects with the Internet, Technology and All Things Digital. SuperDad, athlete, well-read, well-traveled, and the guy other lawyers go to first for advice on the hard stuff, Mark is the first person you hire when you get elected President. Some say way too many Yale people have been working in or sniffing around the White House these days. I disagree.

Posted by JD Hull at 08:00 AM | Comments (0)

Kane: "Who You Know" Needs To Be Pondered, Organized and Updated.

This week I'm in my native Washington, D.C. - where the proper care, feeding and upkeep of The Rolodex has been an art form for a very long time. And this post of a few days ago by Tom Kane at his Legal Marketing Blog is one of the better writings I've seen in a while on true networking basics. Who do you really know? And, to take it a couple of steps further, who do they know? And how do you manage and update all this information? You can't really market the services provided by any size law firm unless you start asking and acting on these questions.

Posted by JD Hull at 07:52 AM | Comments (0)

March 12, 2006

The Evil Bookstore Conspiracy Against Us All: "Think and Grow Rich", "Fish!", "The Road Less Traveled", "Good To Great", "The 7 Habits of..."

I'm back East for 2 weeks in my real stomping grounds of Ohio, Pennsylvania, Maryland and DC, where the earth is starting to show signs of Spring: re-birth, renewal, energy, hope. And in the bookstores as usual there are writings on growing your business, self-improvement, and how to succeed at something--even if it's just Life Itself. The titles alone give you clues--about some key or "secret" that everyone knows but you. So everyone else reads them, gets rich and buys a second home in Nantucket next to Jack Welch's, marries a modern-day Julie Andrews or Alan Alda, has fine, healthy kids headed for Dartmouth, MIT or Tufts, and then they all do a victory lap around you by appearing on CNN with Larry King. You, however, just keep worrying that your retirement funds will somehow vaporize, that your eldest son's resume reads too much like a police blotter, that your best clients will leave you tomorrow morning and that you will peak in life when you get a guest shot on "Small Business Horizons" on the local PBS channel.

Meanwhile, there's all these, well, "titles", programs and signposts: Dale Carnegie's "How to Make Friends and Influence People", Napolean Hill's "Think and Grow Rich", great stuff by Norman Vincent Peale, Deming's 14 points, "Fish!", "What Clients Love", "Rich Dad, Poor Dad", "The Road Less Traveled", John 14:17, The Upanishads, The Prophet, "Who Victimized My Cheese?" and "The 7 Common Sense Habits of Highly Thought-Of People Who Know Things You Don't and You Better Read This or You Will Fail".

But, seriously, I know what they all mean now. Two things:

(1) It is ALL inside you right now, and

(2) If you visualize it, plan it and work for it, you get it.

Period. So if you don't think you are successful right this minute-- in your worst or best moment--you may never be. The way you think and feel is everything and indeed must be made into a habit. Make it a good one.

Posted by JD Hull at 09:09 AM | Comments (0)