But here is a new reason to get involved — at least a little:  to avoid losing your identity in a social networking land grab.

There is only one www.your_name.com domain.  Once it is gone, it is gone.  Have you registered yours yet?  Do you know how much it costs?  About the cost of two lattes from Starbucks.  Per year.  If someone gets there first and registers www.your_name.com before you do, not only do you lose the opportunity to build a presence there, you also can’t stop the person who registered it from putting anything they want on the site.

It is starting to happen.  What began as cute little jokes, like the Twitter account for Fake Steve Jobs, are now morphing into real trouble as internet ne’er do wells (trolls, in geek speak) start exploiting the power of social networking sites to really irk people.

What do you figure would be the impact on your career of having a website at www.your_name.com that features, oh, say, pornography?  Or a Twitter feed at www.twitter.com/your_name sends out consistent messages about your allegiance to the Nazi party.  It can’t help.

Once your name is gone, it is gone, and you really can’t do much about it.  Even if you are not pining away to post on Twitter or join Facebook or even to register a domain name, think about doing it defensively, if for no other reason.  Just like all that stuff from law school, it can be used as a sword or a shield.

It doesn’t take long, cost much or require great technological sophistication and may save you a bunch of anguish in the long run.

Not any more.  Thanks to this handy little tip from the Lawtech Guru Blogger, Jeff Beard, which details simple directions (just 2 steps!) on how to open a second window in Outlook, complete with a screen capture showing how, my toggling days are behind me.

One note: the blog post says that this capability exists in Outlook 2007.  I am still running Outlook 2003 (don’t get me started) and it works equally well in there.

Ever wanted to send a link to something only to find when you copied the URL and pasted it into your email that it was 400 characters long and ended with riverrun?

For example, here is the link to a book on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1422101029/ref=s9subs_c4_14_at1-rfc_p-frt_g1-3237_p_si3?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=0K1RRA3H07SWS24JSRR3&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=454435901&pf_rd_i=507846

It doesn’t have to be that way.  There are lots of great little applications out there that exist for the sole purpose of shrinking those unwieldy URLs into nice little, tidy ones.  The applications have different features, so you may prefer one over another depending on what you care about being able to do with your shrunk URL.

My favorite is TinyURL.  It does the job with a minimum of extra hoo-has and the links created last forever.  Or at least until we live in Water World.

TinyURL, by the way, shrinks that big Amazon link into this:

http://tinyurl.com/64d4r7

Go on, click on it.  You know you want to.

For a good look at some of the other URL shrinkers, check out this excellent article.

Rick Georges of FutureLawyer wrote a post pointing toward an article from PC Magazine a few months back detailing “Eight Handy Tools in Microsoft Word“.  Not all of the tools will be of interest to lawyers, but there are 6 in there that are pretty handy:

1. Shrink document by one page — get rid of that final page that has only your signature on it in one easy step.
2. Calculate in tables — Word’s tables can perform basic calculations, meaning this can take the place of the way most lawyers use Excel.
3. Merge to email — send a Word document easily to a group of email addressees.
4. Compare two documents — one easy step to make sure no accidental or sneaky (lawyers? sneaky?  no way.) changes have been made between versions of a document.
5. Document inspector – Word 2007 only; a very basic metadata scrubber, but better than nothing.
6. Built in translator — instantly translate portions of or entire documents between languages.

Check it out.  You own it already anyway, may as well learn how to use it.

1. Educate your clients — so they recognize good potential clients to send your way.
2. Get testimonials — got a happy client?  Get a written, audio or video testimonial from her.
3. Create a client community — have a regular (quarterly, annual) event and invite all your clients to participate.

It’s not a long post and well worth your time.  Just substitute “client” for “customer” and give it a read!

I understand the allure of the grand gesture:  trapping a witness with the perfect cross examination question, cashing out of stock just before the market crashes, hitting the walk-off home run in your softball game.  They’re rare but unbelievably satisfying when they happen.  They’re the stories of your achievement you bore your friends and family with for years.

They also have less than nothing to do with business development.

Business development — building your law practice with a book full of clients and referral sources who provide you a steady revenue stream — is impervious to the grand gesture.  You can’t say or do the one perfect thing and suddenly have a line of clients outside your door hoping you will be their lawyer.  In order to win at business development you’ve got to follow two simple rules:  1) business development is more like practice than game day, and 2) it’s not about you.

Rule #1:  business development is more like practice than game day

The reason building your practice is impervious to the grand gesture is that business development is not game day — which is to say it is about steady, continuous, small steps rather than superlative performance at one moment in time.  Practice is about honing your skills steadily and over time through diligent work, while game day is about being in the zone and performing well when it counts.

You can’t grow a crop by doing one really fantastic day of watering and tilling.

Networking, social networking, marketing, advertising, PR — whatever your combined strategy for building your practice (and you really ought to have a strategy that involves most, if not all of those five elements), slow and steady wins the race.

Think of it this way: which would be more valuable to building your practice, one 30 second spot during the Super Bowl ($2.6 million in 2008) or spending $220,000 per month over the course of the year in your marketplace to make your potential clients aware of your business?

Rule #2:  business development is not about you

Business Development Is Not About You.  It is about reaching the potential clients who have the kind of problem you want to solve for them.  That’s what makes it so different from the hugely ego-satisfying grand gesture.  The grand gesture is about us, about our need to compete and triumph and display our skills.  I’m not saying the grand gesture is unimportant or valueless in life, just that it will not be the thing that builds you a successful client base.

Create your marketing plan and go out and start working it a little bit every day.  It’s no debutante ball, but it will help make the difference between successful and failure in the big game of building a law practice.

Doesn’t that kind of miss the point though:  where are all the partners?

I’m not defending the associate and law clerk involved.  I’m just saying: when a law firm really blows a gajillion dollar deal like this, it might be nice for someone to take responsibility besides the two lowest paid people in the room.

As the stock market makes yet another pirrouetting nosedive, we have by now heard opinions from both ends of the spectrum:  “don’t panic, it’s panic that is the problem” and “it’s all over, barter your legal services for canned goods”  If that doesn’t cause you some massive cognitive dissonance, go buy yourself another cup of coffee and wake up.  I traded my 401k portfolio to a barista for a grande latte this morning.  But I digress.

Here’s the thing:  you can only control what you can control.

I don’t want to go all Yoda on you or anything, but this is a good time to figure out the difference between what you can control in your practice and what you can’t.  Freaking out about the things that you can not control not only doesn’t help, it also comes with the opportunity cost of not doing some things that might help at least a little.

The things you control will not solve this problem (unless you happen to be a key member of the international financial community, in which case I humbly suggest that you STOP READING THIS BLOG POST AND FIX THE ECONOMY), but they may help dampen the negative impact.  Think of it as boarding up windows before a hurricane.  If the storm is bad enough it won’t save you, but it can’t hurt and might help.

In that vein, here are 3 things you can control, 3 things you can focus all your excess worry and energy on right now:

1. Collect — your outstanding accounts receivable.
2. Stop — working for clients who are not paying you.
3. Slash — budget items that are not mission critical.

You might have other things that you can control, as well, but if you focus on just these three, you may collect a bit more income, stop doing some unprofitable work, and slash a few expenses that don’t help you serve your clients or make money.  The result is a bit more positive cash flow to help you keep on trucking.

At least that is what my Magic 8 Ball told me.

It was about 7:30am when we dragged ourselves into the place.  (Yesterday was our 12th anniversary so we were out drinking celebrating with a bit more abandon than was probably prudent on a Sunday night.)  We were greeted at the counter by an exceptionally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed barista.  Now, I generally like happy, enthusiastic people in life, but this chick was peppy with a capital “P” and had clearly been mainlining espresso for several hours.

As we handed over our reusable commuter mugs (it is a ticketable offense in Chapel Hill if you fail to use one of these and instead grab a paper cup) the barista fairly well screamed at us, “are you having a SUPER AWESOME TERRIFIC Monday?”  As I restrained my wife from stuffing the peppy barista headfirst into one of the giant coffee grinders like a weirdly caffeinated variant on the ending of Fargo, it occurred to me that this is a lesson everyone in the service business (yes, that includes lawyers and bar association employees) needs to pay attention to:  try not to annoy your clients.

Whether you practice divorce law or work up collateralized debt obligations (and if this is your practice area, thanks for helping to destroy the economy, I never wanted to retire anyway) your clients come in to see you in a particular emotional state and frame of mind.  They may be depressed, nervous, angry, or even happy (do any of you practice happy people law?  What’s that like?), and it is your job to understand that feeling and mirror it.

You don’t need to go all crazy active listening (”what I hear you saying is, you’d like to kill your spouse and hide the body…”) just get attuned enough so that your behavior doesn’t annoy your client.  Be sensitive to the fact that while you may be having a great (or awful) day, your clients are having some kind of day of their own and don’t need you harshing their mellow or, God forbid, trying to pep them up at 7:30 a.m.

Have a SUPER AWESOME TERRIFIC Monday!

The other two members of my panel were Lee Rosen and Stephanie Kimbro, both practicing North Carolina lawyers and smart technologists.  The program was a big success and we gave the attendees a bunch of sites that are useful, interesting or fun (and sometimes all of the above) to put in their favorites menu right away.

I’ve included the list of sites (with links) here on Law Practice Matters in case you would like to check them out.