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Multicasting Your Practice - EL101MB

Multicasting Your Practice: Webcasts, Podcasts, Blogs & More

Course Overview - 55 Minutes - FREE

Of the many forces bringing change to the practice of
law, perhaps none is as powerful or has the long-term
impact of the emerging social-networking culture. In
this new paradigm of constant communication the
value of any particular message is lessened and the
power of any particular message is dependent upon
whether it is talked about. In other words, ìword of
mouthî has come of age as a powerful forceóand it
happens (or doesnít happen) instantaneously and
along pathways that are increasingly non-linear.

For lawyers this means things like reputation can
change in a dayóor in a conversation. It means that
one unhappy client can become an avalanche of bad
buzz. It also means that good buzz can travel faster
and wider than ever before. And it means that the
temptation to engage in social networking in ways
that push the limits of established ethics rules is ever-present.

This seminar will teach you to navigate the new socially networked world so you can effectively communicate who you are, what you can do for people and why you can be trusted. If you understand how to accomplish this within the rules you will prosper in the networked world.

You have 3 days to complete the program from the date/time you enroll

Growing Your Practice with Podcasts - EL201MB

Cost: $50.00

Growing Your Practice with Podcasts

Course Overview - 56 Minutes - $50

Podcasts are a relatively new entrant into the realm of business communication tools, but their use and acceptance is rising at an incredibly fast pace.

Podcasts are video or audio-based broadcast presentations. Generally they fall into two categories: Onetime programs on a specific issue or topic; or ongoing ìserialî discussions about an issue. For example, a lawyer might create a one-time podcast on the impact of a change to the tax code, but also create a series of podcasts about tax law issues in general.

Podcasts are a more personal version of blogs. They are typically marketed via the firm website, a blog or on websites that cater to people interested in particular subjects. As such they can be excellent tools to use to demonstrate expertise to prospective clients.

This e-course covers three components to successful use of podcasts. First, we walk students through the process of creating and using them. Second, we discuss several specific uses for marketing and revenue- generation. Third, we provide an ethics-based best- practices guide for using podcasts properly within the bounds of accepted legal industry business practices.

Course Highlights

Choosing the best technology
Preparing a presentation for delivery via podcast
Best practices for selecting topics for a program
Partnering to generate buzz about your podcasts

You have 3 days to complete the program from the date/time you enroll

Growing Your Practice with Blogs - EL301MB

Cost: $50.00

Growing Your Practice with Blogs

Course Overview - 67 Minutes - $50

Lawyers en masse are beginning to understand the power of ìbloggingî because the form of communicationówritingócomes naturally to many lawyers and because blogs are getting more attention in the media.

To be an effective use of a lawyerís time, a blog must be startedóand maintainedówith a specific outcome in mind. This e-course discusses the use of blogs to communicate expertise to an industry, to generate ìbuzzî among prospective clients and to position oneself as an expert.

As blogs develop into a medium of communication as ubiquitous as e-mail, inevitable issues are arising about what can and cannot and what should and should not be said on a blog. Lawyers need to be especially sensitive to issues such as libel, slander and speaking without proper facts, as well as when it is alright to have a strong opinion about something.

This e-course provides a how-to guide for creating effective blogs as well as a point by point discussion of a wide range of ethics issues and best practices.

You have 3 days to complete the program from the date/time you enroll

Growing Your Practice with Webcasts - EL401MB

Cost: $50.00

Growing Your Practice with Webcasts

Course Overview - $50 - 60 Minutes

Webcasts are a relatively simple and extremely powerful tool for building your brand, educating clients, peers and prospects and generating new business.

Webcasts allow you to communicate detailed information to people from a distance. This offers convenience to your customers and cost-savings to youóboth in actual dollars and in time. You can create webcasts for client groups, such as industry-specific clients, or you can create materials designed to interest prospects in a core area of your practice. You can also create MCLE materials for peers. In each of these areas you can generate revenues as you build your brand.

The Internet continues to develop around subject-specific websites. As this continues, the marketing opportunities you have get better and better, because you can target certain channels populated by people who are likely to be interested in your materials. In addition, the partnering opportunities presented to you have greater value. First, you can partner with websites whose site visitor demographics match the materials you have. Second, you can partner with consultants and others who have their own web-based audiences that may find your materials even more compelling because those people already have an affinity and a trusted relationship to your partner.

This course provides a how-to guide for creating effective webcasts for clients and prospects and for peers as well as detailed information about how to best market your materials.

You have 3 days to complete the program from the date/time you enroll

Growing Your Practice with E-courses - EL501MB

Cost: $50.00

Growing Your Practice with E-courses

Course Overview - 60 Minutes - $50

E-courses are a relatively simple and extremely powerful tool for building your brand, educating clients, peers and prospects and generating new business.

E-courses allow you to communicate detailed information to people from a distance. This offers convenience to your customers and cost-savings to youóboth in actual dollars and in time. You can create E-courses for client groups, such as industry-specific clients, or you can create materials designed to interest prospects in a core area of your practice. You can also create MCLE materials for peers. In each of these areas you can generate revenues as you build your brand. Best of all, e-courses allow you to generate passive incomeócreate the materials once and let them work for you while you are doing other things.

The Internet continues to develop around subject-specific websites. As this continues, the marketing opportunities you have get better and better, because you can target certain channels populated by people who are likely to be interested in your materials. In addition, the partnering opportunities presented to you have greater value. First, you can partner with websites whose site visitor demographics match the materials you have. Second, you can partner with consultants and others who have their own web-based audiences that may find your materials even more compelling because those people already have an affinity and a trusted relationship to your partner.

This course provides a how-to guide for creating effective E-courses for clients and prospects and for peers as well as detailed information about how to best market your materials.

You have 3 days to complete the program from the date/time you enroll

Crisis Planning consulting for Lawyers - EPA101MB

Cost: $50.00

Crisis Planning Consulting for Lawyers

Course Overview -$50 - 56 Minutes

We can point to three recent, major crises that can impact clients in very different ways. Lawyers should view crisis planning and prevention as a way to provide truly invaluable service to clients, before, during and after a crisis hits.

The events of 9/11 and to a degree the Oklahoma City and World Trade Center bombings led to direct crises for business and individuals. The 9/11 crisis stands out because the impact was immediately national and international in scope. The Enron crisis (as well as those crises involving other business ethics) presented a creeping crisis that impacted companies and industries. The Katrina disaster represented a crisis that impacted nearly everyone in a specific region. Each of these crises had a wider impact from federal legislation and regulation.

For lawyers it is vital to understand that crises like these are not isolated, but are endemic of a global culture undergoing tremendous and rapid change. The ability to forecast, mitigate and manage the inevitable crises in the future that clients will endure can place your firm at the very core of importance. Therefore, learning how to market these services to clients on a prescriptive basis is vitally important.

Course Highlights

The New Reality: Culture of Compliance, Blame & Fear
Enron, Sarbanes-Oxley and corporate compliance
Entitlements, victims and rising numbers of lawsuits
9/11, Katrina and other disasters
Preventive Lawyering for Business Clients
Responding to Crises: the Lawyerís Role
How to Start & Grow a Crisis Prevention & Response Practice
Consulting Tool: crisis readiness audit
Working with crisis planning consultants

You have 3 days to complete the program from the date/time you enroll

Technology & The Emergence of ODR/ADR as a Practice Area - EPA201MB

Cost: $50.00

Technology & The Emergence of ODR/ADR as a Practice Area

Course Overview - $50 - 59 Minutes

One of the truly exciting new practice areas for lawyers is in the fast-growing field of alternative dispute resolution. As the general public becomes more aware of the personal and financial costs of conflict, as well as the lengthy time-frames of traditional litigation, many are turning to alternative methods for resolving disputes. The rising costs of business litigation, combined with the success of online dispute resolution vehicles such as that provided for E-Bay by Square Trade, has thousands of businesses seeking similar methods to resolve a wide range of conflicts. Government agencies are rapidly adopting various forms of alternative dispute resolution procedures, and many federal and state courts are mandating alternative dispute resolution for a widening variety of cases.

All of this means new opportunities for lawyers. Even lawyers whose practices are focused on litigation will enhance their overall mix of services by providing alternative dispute resolution expertise when their clients want it. For lawyers whose practices are focused on business and commercial law, alternative dispute resolution will be in increasing demand among their clients. The rapid emergence of technology tools to enable dispute resolution via the Internet, as well as without third party intermediaries in some cases, has created new markets: First for companies selling the network services and Web technology to enable the process; and second for professional alternative dispute resolution specialists, many of whom are not attorneys.

This course will present lawyers with detailed information about the factors leading people, businesses, courts and government agencies to choose alternative dispute resolution in a growing number of situations. The course will also present an analysis of the tools and companies that are enabling ODR. It will also provide examples of lawyers making the transition to the incorporation of ODR and ADR into their practices. Weíll also detail how to establish and grow a practice in this field, by presenting specific examples about how to discuss this with clients and where to use ADR/ODR to extend your overall services.

The future of conflict resolution appears to be squarely focused on a new view of conflictósomething to be prevented where possible, reduced in magnitude where possible and resolved outside the courthouse where at all possible. Any lawyer wanting to prepare for this fast-approaching future should consider registering for this course.

You have 3 days to complete the program from the date/time you enroll

Breaking the Billable Hour Habit - BUS101MB

Cost: $50.00

Breaking the Billable Hour Habit

Course Overview - 100 Minutes - $50

The wide availability of legal information and the rise of websites (as well as books, tapes, CDs, etc.) that provide legal information from non-lawyers continues to undermine the business of practicing law.

One important development affecting law firms is the so-called commoditization of certain types of legal information. This is a form of unbundling taken to the extreme. The goal of this seminar is to teach lawyers to participate in this economy and to do so within the bounds of ethics and good business practices.

Regardless of how many non-lawyers sell legal information, especially online, the fact is that lawyers and law firms remain the best and most trusted source for this information. As lawyers become more skilled at providing information to clients and prospective clients in the same basic ways it is being provided by non-lawyers, they can recapture some of the lost business brought about by such competitors.

In this seminar you will learn how to ethically, safely and profitably provide various types of legal information that can generate revenues and build new relationships.

Course Highlights

Limitations on the billable hour dependent lawyer
The hidden assets every lawyer can leverage now
Six Ways to Break the Billable Hour Habit
Training and education
Publishing blogs and podcasts
Partnering with websites
Providing adjunct services
Offering legal commodities
Multidisciplinary practice
Focused billable hour income
Passive income
Specialization

You have 3 days to complete the program from the date/time you enroll

How to Productize Your Practice - BUS201MB

Cost: $50.00

How To Productize A Law Practice

Course Overview - 66 Minutes - $50

The wide availability of legal information and the rise of websites (as well as books, tapes, CDs, etc.) that provide legal information from non-lawyers continues to undermine the business of practicing law. The wide availability of legal information and the rise of websites (as well as books, tapes, CDs, etc.) that provide legal information from non-lawyers continues to undermine the business of practicing law.

One important development affecting law firms is the so-called commoditization of certain types of legal information. This is a form of unbundling taken to the extreme. The goal of this seminar is to teach lawyers to participate in this economy and to do so within the bounds of ethics and good business practices.

Regardless of how many non-lawyers sell legal information, especially online, the fact is that lawyers and law firms remain the best and most trusted source for this information. As lawyers become more skilled at providing information to clients and prospective clients in the same basic ways it is being provided by non-lawyers, they can recapture some of the lost business brought about by such competitors.

In this seminar you will learn how to ethically, safely and profitably provide various types of legal information that can generate revenues and build new relationships.

Course Highlights

The Changing Role of Lawyers in a Connected World
E-Lawyering and the Legal Products Business
Advice vs. information: Best practices
Partnering to generate business

You have 3 days to complete the program from the date/time you enroll

Business Development in the Constant Communication World - BUS301MB

Cost: $50.00

Business Development in the Constant Communication World

Course Overview - 80 Minutes - $50

Many law firms are seeking to expand their level of sophistication in the realm of marketing, while still following the guidelines of professional business etiquette and bar rules.

Constant Communication is a new paradigm wrought by the rapid development of our technology tools juxtaposed against the slower growth in our ability to manage these tools effectively. In the new paradigm information overload besets nearly everyone. While the tools themselves often seem to be the cause of overload, when we look more closely we learn that it is the way we use the tools that actually causes overload, stress and burnout.

In this course we begin by looking at the impact of constant communication on lawyers in their practices. We focus upon the converging factors of more demands and less time to illustrate how it feels to be at the mercy of incredible technological advances when our coping skills simply havenít caught up. We then expand our understanding broadly to see that this is impacting everyone, including our peers and clients. We then move into a discussion about how to erect personal barriers to better cope with the twin factors of increasing demands and less time.

In the second part of the course we examine how to communicate with others, specifically how to market, in the new paradigm. We begin by addressing the key factors of the new paradigm and how people are responding to them. Within each we discuss how to effectively pierce through the barriers people have erected to protect themselves from being inundated by information. As we discuss how to do this, we teach lawyers how to accomplish it without simply increasing the information burdens on othersóespecially others with whom lawyers want to create long-term relationships.