Yes, Virginia! Lawyers Can and Do Develop Business through Blogging

Five years ago I left the practice of law to pursue an ADR practice. Though I'd been a partner at my last firm (now merged with another) I had never developed a lick of my own business. I was an old-fashioned "service partner," providing high quality legal services to our institutional clients. No single lawyer in that firm was going to walk away with the firm's primary client -- the London Market Insurance Carriers nor any of the other insurance carriers for whom we litigated (and sometimes tried) catastrophic insurance coverage claims by Fortune 500 policy holders.

You get the picture ("yes we see").

Though I'm now affiliated with an ADR panel (ADR Services, Inc. in Century City (Los Angeles) California) I, like most attorneys-turned-mediators and arbitrators, had to build my business on my own. From scratch.

I've written about the steps I took to undertake this daunting task for a non-networking, non-rain-making attorney here.

I'd like to focus right now on one part of my business development plan that began on a whim and has since brought me business throughout the United States and around the world; that has provided me with a community of supporters and people I'm now more than grateful to call my very good friends: blogging.

Oh No! Not More About BLOGGING!!!

I've written about how and why to blog elsewhere as well: here and here for instance, as have my blogging ADR friends, Diane Levin, for instance, the god-mother of the entire ADR blogosphere (here). Diane's and my posts, as well as our other blogging friends' "how to" posts appeared not only in our own blogs, but in the nationally known and well-respected Legal Blog Watch, Law.com's blog, here.

So I'm not going to repeat all that. I'm just going to tell you three short stories about why blogging has been very very good to me.

National Media Attention

Six months after starting my negotiation blog on blogger (its FREE and super easy!) (this was the "whim" part) I called Kevin O'Keefe, the patron saint of all (o.k., MOST) legal bloggers and owner of LexBlog. I wanted to explore with Kevin the benefits of purchasing a professionally designed and maintained web site. Kevin asked what I'd want my blog to do for me within five years and I said "make me the go-to complex commercial mediator in the country." His response? "No problem!"

I've been blogging three years now (2 1/2 years with Kevin's blog/s - yes I have a second specialty ADR Blog - the IP ADR Blog). I've since been interviewed numerous times both by the online legal press and by the local "hard copy" legal newspaper. I've been contacted by reporters for People Magazine, NPR, Law.com, the Los Angeles Times and PRI's "Marketplace" (my 15 seconds of public radio fame here).

Sometimes my comments hit the cutting room floor, but often not, and I hadn't been interviewed AT ALL since I represented a porno shop in Sacramento against local zoning ordinances (yes, I lost; it was SACRAMENTO: give me a break!)

Clients from Around the World

I'm not talking "little" clients. I'm talking HUGE CLIENTS in an 8-figure piece of commercial litigation, one of which came to the West Coast from a foreign English speaking country and the other which flew from the East Coast to San Francisco. Two day mediation. That's just one example, but I have to admit it's my best.

New Streams of Income

Like many lawyers developing their practices, I hit the speaking circuit in 2005 to market myself. I didn't CHARGE the law firms or Bar Associations for which I spoke. I was happy just to get in front of my market and show off my talents a little. Then one day late last year, a trade association called me and asked me to be the keynote speaker at their annual conference. KEYNOTE. SPEAKER. I didn't even HAVE a speaking or training business. So I did what any ambitious young person would do (and savvy over-50's do as well): I made up a fee & wowed the crowd.

Just a few months later, days, actually, after I'd told my husband "I'm going to monetize speaking this year" I received a telephone call from a major telecommunications company asking me if I could train their 100-member legal staff. Uh . . . . YEAH!! I still wasn't MARKETING myself as a trainer or a speaker, but when the search committee for the firm's annual training committee called an old law school professor in, like, Minnesota or Michigan or somewhere else I've rarely been, he said "try Vickie Pynchon. She's got this great negotiation blog."

Two day training. Good money. Speaker and trainer web site in the works now.

As I was telling the chairman of a major national law firm over lunch the other day when he said he was sort of interested in getting his attorneys into social media - "you know, I keep telling law firms and lawyers that there are bricks of social media gold lying on the streets and sidewalks of Los Angeles and they all keep telling me 'oh no! it looks radioactive to me!'"

That's ok. 20th century marketing still works pretty well locally and I don't NEED the competition.