eDiscovery Careers: Achieving Success as a Non-Attorney in a Law Firm: Make Yourself Well Known
May 08, 2012
In this blog series on achieving success, we’ve already covered finding / making the right environment and building a skills and knowledge base. Those steps are important. Another key to achieving success is making yourself well-known in the firm. And that means marketing yourself. A few months ago, I did an entire blog series on Marketing a Litigation Support Department in a Firm. Marketing yourself and marketing your department go hand-in-hand with one another, so some of the points we’ll cover here may sound familiar to you if you followed that previous blog series.
Here are some suggestions for making sure people in the firm know who you are and how you can help them:
1. Be proactive: Don’t sit around waiting for things to happen. New projects and new clients won’t just come to you (or at least, not very often). Take steps everyday to get new clients (the attorneys in your firm) on board and to keep existing clients happy
2. Develop a marketing plan: In short, here’s what you need to do:
- Determine what your clients need and determine what services and tools you can provide. See where there’s a match and develop your department around that overlap.
- Determine appropriate marketing mechanisms (for example, a brochure with service descriptions, newsletters, presentations) and develop marketing materials
- Prepare a schedule and budget for marketing activities and line up resources. For example, if you’re going to give presentations, then determine topics, dates, who’s going to present, and so on. If you’re going to travel to different offices to do marketing, build travel costs into your budget.
3. Get your ducks in a row: Make sure you can deliver what you are going to promote. Make sure that you have the right staff, the right technology, and the right processes in place. Don’t start promoting services until you are confident that you can provide them. Taking on a task without sufficient resources can do damage that is devastating and hard to overcome.
4. Move forward with marketing activities: There are lots of things you can be doing…distribute service descriptions (or brochures), do seminars and presentations, create a newsletter, make trips to other offices to promote your services, build a web site or get a page on the firm’s web site, become part of the firm’s new-hire orientation program, do regular follow-up with attorneys for whom you’ve done good work and get referrals, testimonials and references.
I’ll give you more pointers for making yourself well-known in the next posts. So, what do you think? How have you made yourself well known in your firm? Please let us know if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.
Disclaimer: The views represented herein are exclusively the views of the author, and do not necessarily represent the views held by CloudNine Discovery. eDiscoveryDaily is made available by CloudNine Discovery solely for educational purposes to provide general information about general eDiscovery principles and not to provide specific legal advice applicable to any particular circumstance. eDiscoveryDaily should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a lawyer you have retained and who has agreed to represent you.
