My Shingle

Marketing & Making Money

Tax Day: A Reminder of The Ups and Downs of Solo Practice

April 15, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

With 2012 taxes now complete, I’ve officially marked the last action of the worst year of my practice in a half-decade. While I won’t discuss everything that went wrong, the problem is pretty obvious: more money out, less money in.  In my case, an office upgrade and more personnel took a bit of a toll [...]

Read more Marketing & Making Money 5 comments

Yelp Sets the Gold Standard for the Type of Value Disclosures That Law Firm Marketing Sites Should Provide

March 26, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

According to Techcrunch, Yelp, an online customer feedback site has announced a new feature that will help small business owners quantify the value of their Yelp listing.  To estimate a listing’s worth, Yelp examines customer leads like bookmarking a Yelp business listing, mapping directions to the business, placing a phone call from the Yelp app, [...]

Read more Marketing & Making Money 0 comments

Future of Law Friday: API Your Law Practice for Future Growth and Collaboration

March 1, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

A week or two ago, I observed that many lawyers are opting to use a combination of platforms for storage, practice management, client portals and other law office functions rather than settling on a single general solution.  The rise of API’s, or application programming interfaces that enable different systems to communicate seamlessly have been driving [...]

Read more Future Fridays 1 comment

Doing work that you love in your law practice when it doesn’t pay the bills.

February 25, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Starting and running your own law firm allows you the autonomy to pick and choose the kinds of cases you want to handle. But what happens when there’s no apparent market for the work that you love or where a market exists but the work isn’t financially viable? A lack of market refers to a [...]

Read more Business Models 1 comment

Logos on Spec, Revisited

February 21, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

More than three years ago, I wrote one of my most popular and widely-circulated blog posts, Would You Work on Spec? Why Should Your Logo Designer.  My post listed several disadvantages to design contest sites like 99Designs (potentially poor quality submissions and possibility of stolen work), but mainly, I griped that it was hypocritical for [...]

Read more Marketing & Making Money 7 comments

Could 3-D Printing offer a new dimension for law firm business and marketing?

February 20, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

At a time when law firms are replacing conventional printers with scanners to facilitate a move to a paperless practice and the cloud, three-dimensional printers might seem like a step backwards.  To the contrary, though, they’re rapidly becoming mainstream as the costs of 3D printing are declining faster  than anyone could have predicted with home-based [...]

Read more Marketing & Making Money 0 comments

Continue Your Education with Skillshare.com

December 26, 2012 by Carolyn Elefant

When it comes to post-law school learning, most lawyers think of continuing legal education or CLE.  And while it’s important for lawyers to stay fresh on law-related developments in their respective practice areas, in these dynamic times, lawyers — and particularly solos — need to learn other skills as well.  While large firm lawyers or [...]

Read more Marketing & Making Money 1 comment

My Shingle Gift Guide

December 7, 2012 by Carolyn Elefant

It’s December, the month in which a blogger’s fancy turns to holiday gift guides.  Last month, Reid Trautz published his 8th Annual Holiday Gift Guide, but you’ll find more ideas at Allison Shields’Legal Ease  gift guide  and tech-focused suggestions at Niki Black’s Sui Generis and a round-up of links to gift ideas by Jim Calloway. [...]

Read more Announcements 1 comment

The Ethics of Legal Subscription Services

August 13, 2012 by Carolyn Elefant

Via Jordan Furlong’s  twitter stream, I learned about Legal Care, a UK-based legal subscription service.  The Legal Care package costs 14 pounds/month and includes  free template documents, a will pack, document review service, 25 percent discount on fees if a solicitor is needed and a guaranteed response to emailed inquires within an hour, 24/7. Legal [...]

Read more Marketing & Making Money 0 comments

For Solos and Small Law Firms, Be A Rockstar in Your Community By Unlocking the Potential of the The Seven-figure Ancillary Legal Services

July 25, 2012 by Carolyn Elefant

My apologies for the blazing passion of the title of this post.  I just figured that any headline with the term “ancillary” would send readers running unless counterbalanced with the mesmerizing language of a marketing hack.  And the concept of ancillary markets is too important not to understand in an era of change in the [...]

Read more Marketing & Making Money 1 comment

← Previous Entries