My Shingle

A Lead Generating Website Gone Too Far

March 12, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Update, 3/12/13 (3 pm) Solosez member and contract lawyer Lisa Solomon posted about this on her Facebook page and Richard Komaiko, Attorney Fee’s founder is feeling the heat. The emerging dialogue should serve as a warning to future law-preneurs you don’t go beta when people’s careers and livelihood (even lawyers) are on the line. About [...]

Read more Marketing Ethics 2 comments

Reinvent Law: Solos Lost in the Transition

March 11, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

I did not attend ReinventLaw, but would have liked to. With four matters pending in various stages at the D.C. Circuit and my daughters in the height of school activities, traveling cross country even for a day wasn’t in the cards this time. So I settled for tracking the conference via the #reinventlaw hashtag feed [...]

Read more MyShingle Solo 3 comments

Future of Law Friday: Marketing With Menus

March 8, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Buying legal services can be confusing. Sometimes – in cases where work is unpredictable, or facts are unknown, opaque information may be acceptable. But for work that is commodity in nature or more predictable, there’s no reason not to make prices available to consumers – if not on your website, then at least in materials [...]

Read more Future Fridays 0 comments

Could co-learning offer a rescue line for offline (live) CLE

March 7, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Earlier this week, Scott Greenfield asked whether live CLE can survive in a largely online, virtual world? After all, live CLE costs more to produce (room rental and potential travel costs for a speaker) and may attract fewer attendees because a live event doesn’t have the same flexibility as a watch-it-anywhere webinar. Yet, as Scott [...]

Read more Tech & Web 3 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

Sponsored and branded legal briefs: Appealing or appalling?

February 27, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

If you’re a regular reader, you know that I’ve often griped about 21st century advancements like  attorney bidding sites or listing sites not because I’m trying to defend lawyers’ turf, but rather, because I’m  skeptical as to whether these sites really expand access to law in a meaningful way.  As I’ve written here, many of [...]

Read more Litigation & Courts: Policy and Practice 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

A Valentine’s Post: Business Porn and Putting the Magic Back in Starting a Law Firm

February 14, 2013 by Carolyn Elefant

Because of this blog and a national practice, I travel out of town several times a year for speaking engagements, conferences and hearings.  Rather than feign work on a long cramped bus or plane ride, I generally stay up until 3 am the night before I depart, scrambling to push assignments out the door.  That [...]

Read more Encouragement 9 comments

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →