South Carolina Trial Law Blog

Michelle Golden of Legal Ease Blog asks: What's With All of the Legal Consultants?:

It’s only natural that more and more consultants would be cropping up as more and more people graduate from law school and competition gets stiffer and stiffer. Perhaps years ago you could just hang out a shingle and as long as you knew what you were doing in the legal arena, you’d get business. With less lawyers to compete against, it was easier for the community to find the lawyers, and more people knew who was who. That just isn’t the case now.

Law is a business, and there are plently of lawyers who need help with running a business, managing people, managing time, managing cases, bringing in business, and keeping clients happy. Clients are getting more demanding, and lawyers need to start focusing more on what the clients want and less on the lawyer’s skills.

I think it’s a brave new world and you don’t get ahead by doing the same thing everyone else does. I use the following consultants:

• Business Coaching – To maximize my strong suits and minimize my weak points. I have found that rhw rwm I build is just as important as my trial skills. I use a two person team of business coaches. One an attorney with 35 plus years experience, and the other is just a business guru.
• Trial Consultant – To stay up on the latest techniques and tips on trial work. With tort reform in the news and the changing demographic pool of the jury, the landscape is shifting for injury lawyers. In addition to using a trial consultant for any individual case, I schedule monthly meetings to stay up on the current ‘tech’.
• Marketing Consultant  – To help design a logo, stationary and other literature and to help get my message across.
• Blogging Consultant – To help stay current on all of the weblog tech.
• Website Consultant – To stay current on SEO topics.
• Case Management Consultant – To help on maximizing my case management software.

I try to find the most knowledgeable people in the country and use them. I think it helps to leverage their knowledge and shorten my learning curve. I also have a number of informal mentors that have provided a lot of guidance. After awhile, you build a team that’s large enough that you can’t do everything. Plus…I need all the help I can get.

Thanks for referencing my post on the Legal Ease Blog about consultants. I should note, however, that Michelle Golden is the author of Golden Practices, while the Legal Ease Blog is written by me (although I do reference Michelle's excellent blog regularly).

It's always important to have a team of professionals helping each of us see our 'blind spots' and improve our strengths. But it's crucial when working with a number of consultants to have someone who is focused on the overall strategy of your practice, and ensuring that all of the consultants are helping you move in the same direction.

Allison Shields
Legal Ease Blog
LawyerMeltdown.com

Interesting post, Dave. I used it in Trial Ad Notes (trialadnotes.blogspot.com) and in a piece for non-lawyers at shlep (blogs.law.harvard.edu/shlep). We all need to learn to get help from good sources, even when we're doing things "on our own."