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Here’s a guest post from business coach at Law Practice Queen Business Coaching LLC  Katie Lipp on three public speaking mistakes people make that you should obviously avoid. (Listen to her – she knows what she’s talking about!)

  • Not Focusing on Your Audience. Focus your content on what the audience came for – they came to get the 411 on a particular topic that you have a unique perspective on. Get to the “meat” of the presentation quickly, because we have short attention spans.
  • Taking Yourself too Seriously. You are there for the audience, not for you! Think about the benefit the audience will get from the message you are there to deliver. You are a vessel for an important message that changes lives!
  • Reading Directly from Slides. You are not a robot. Feel free to go off script! The best presentations are prepared, but also tailored to the individual audience that shows up.

Erin Marie Meyer is the Pro Bono Counsel at Proskauer Rose LLP, where she manages the firm’s global pro bono practice. Prior to that, Erin was a senior litigation associate at Hogan Lovells US LLP. I met Erin when we both worked at Proskauer, and I admire her for being a champion of diversity and inclusion, social justice and public service in Big Law.

Erin writes about a variety of pro bono legal issues for Proskauer’s blog, Proskauer For Good. Learn more about Erin in this Women Who Wow profile.

Continue Reading Women Who Wow: Erin Marie Meyer

I’m moderating a webinar of all-star legal professionals tomorrow at 12:30pm on the current boom in legal hiring for Leopard Solutions and how to retain your lawyers in a competitive market.

Several top law firms have increased entry-level lawyer salaries to $200K per year. The news of the increase in junior associate pay comes after a year of record-breaking profits and competition to retain their workforce that has billed long hours at home during the pandemic.

This webinar is very timely and important for law firms and recruiters to learn how law firms, legal recruiters and candidates can use this market to their advantage, how to source and compete for candidates at all levels in a competitive market, how law firms can better retain their people, how to set your lateral hires up for success, the unique challenges/opportunities for women lawyers and diverse lawyers in the current market, the unique opportunities for mid-size and small law firms today, and more.

I’ll also be speaking about how important it is to have a recruiting marketing strategy in place at your firm during the webinar – which is something many firms overlook (it’s not enough to do great legal work and have a stellar brand name on the door anymore – you need to actively market to students and laterals to remain top of mind and ensure they know what makes you stand apart from competitors).

One of the things I love to do is work with law firms on recruiting marketing – it was the very first project I was hired to do at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP back almost 20 years ago.

This panel is composed of leaders in the legal industry who will discuss the current legal market hiring boom from their valuable perspectives.

We have David Rose, a member of the Executive Committee at Pryor Cashman, Daniel DiResta, an executive director at a mid-size firm, Danielle Rosetti the chief legal talent officer at Buchanan Ingersoll & Rooney PC, Nicole Kennedy the head of associate recruiting at top recruiter Lucas Group, legal strategist Mary K Young from Zeughauser Group, Laura Leopard, the CEO and founder of legal research powerhouse Leopard Solutions and Dyana Pinkerton Barninger, the head of legal talent recruiting at Faegre Drinker.

Join us! 

 

I’m so excited for the next Women Who Wow webinar on 6/17 because I get to share the virtual stage with Helen Burness and Katie Lipp to talk about how we built our businesses and brands using social media. PS – I met Katie and Helen on LinkedIn of course!

We will cover how to:

  • Create a strong LinkedIn brand to help achieve your goals as well as how to use other key social networks such as Instagram and TikTok for marketing
  • Be more intentional about developing your personal brand and network through speaking opportunities, article writing/blogging, volunteer and board roles
  • Promote yourself and your business without seeming overly boastful
  • Generate a steady stream of ideas for posts that will resonate with your network
  • Find your “Kevin Bacon effect” and your passion while building your subject matter authority
  • Efficiently manage your own personal marketing along with the demands of work and everyday life

I hope you will join us for what I know will be a great conversation filled with actionable takeaways for women of all levels of their careers. Register here.

Copy of LinkedIn Hashtags

If you missed my webinar on how to use hashtags on LinkedIn, here’s a recap of the key points, as well as the top hashtags in the legal industry, legal recruiting, diversity and legal marketing areas.

(Remember the more followers a hashtag has doesn’t necessarily mean the better the hashtag – you don’t want your content to get lost). There’s lots of opportunity with being an early adopter of some hashtags so that you are the person who comes up when people search it. How and when to use them is noted in the slides below.

PS – using hashtags in your headline, summary or work experience sections aren’t the same as using them in a post. Hashtags on LinkedIn only matter in posts.

I prefer to include hashtags at the end of a post. You should use only 3 to 5 hashtags or LinkedIn will likely mark your post as spam.

I left program attendees with this homework that you can do too:

I left program attendees with this homework that you can do too:

  • Start building a hashtag strategy for key practices/industries and areas such as diversity/recruiting and pro bono.
  • Research hashtags (that means clicking on each of them) before you use them and keep lists by topics and practice/industries, etc.
  • Review analytics to see how the posts do with hashtags and reuse those hashtags that do well (also some posts do fine without hashtags at all).
  • Train lawyers and others on how to use hashtags effectively to truly harness their power. Make it easy for them to use hashtags by sending them examples of what they should post.

Happy hashtagging! Feel free to reach out to me with any questions or a copy of the slides.

The next Woman Who Wows is Jennifer Gillman, the President of Gillman Strategic Group, a legal recruiting company focused solely on law firm partner placement.

Her goal is to help dissatisfied law firm partners and solo practitioners find the perfect fit at another firm, which can make a dramatic difference in their career and personal satisfaction.

After practicing law for 12 years, she realized that legal recruiting combined her two passions of law and matchmaking. She worked with a full-service New Jersey legal recruiting firm for 10 years, before following her dream and launching Gillman Strategic Group in 2018.

Get to know more about Jennifer in this profile.

Continue Reading Women Who Wow: Jennifer Gillman

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The newly launched NIL (Name Image and Likeness) Legislation Tracker by Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr LLP is a great example of a law firm creating a useful product that differentiates them and helps build their brand in a specific practice.

The web site tracks the rapidly changing landscape of legislation affecting how NCAA athletes can profit from the use of their name, image or likeness (NIL).

I wish more firms took the time to create resources like this. Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP did years ago with its Dodd Frank Financial Regulatory Tracker tool.

You can too – if you try to solve your clients’ problems and step into their shoes, you can find a creative idea in a practice or industry that aligns with your business goals and then strategically execute it.

Don’t wait on something like this if it’s a “hot” practice/industry area or issue, and don’t overcomplicate the project. Time is of the essence in most cases as is being first to market.

Becoming a helpful, novel resource like this is the pinnacle of content marketing success for a law firm or any professional service firm in my opinion. This is the kind of tool that a client would easily share with colleague or referral, and it has the ability to go “viral” and help your organization and the creators behind it be seen as subject matter experts.

When creating a resource tool, be sure to put your logo on it front and center – so you get full credit (think branding).

Kudos to Saul Ewing for a great idea and execution of it. You can check it out here.

LinkedIn Content Me

Many people and companies take the time to create a post for social media and then they never use it again – I call this “one and done.” This is a mistake because most of your followers will never see that post (based on LinkedIn’s algorithm) and even those who do won’t remember it even if they liked it (trust me on this).

Also, not everyone who is following you now on LinkedIn or currently reading your blog/newsletter was reading it in the past and even if they were, it doesn’t mean they saw every single piece of content you published. In fact LinkedIn’s algorithm makes it almost impossible to ensure that everyone will see your content.

Too often we make the mistake of publishing content, promoting it and moving on from it forever. You don’t actually need to constantly create new content. Reposting your content is smart, efficient and will help increase the visibility of your posts.

Keep a record of your top-performing posts in an editorial calendar – I wait a month or so between reposting a piece of content. I may make slight tweaks to it, like changing the image, the first line of text or the hashtags, but for the most part, the post remains the same.

This is how you make your content work harder and smarter for you, and stay top of mind with your followers.

Check out this video to learn more. And yes that is a dog with a squeaky toy in the background.

Keywords (1)

Here’s an important way to help your LinkedIn profile become more discoverable on Google – LinkedIn SEO.

LinkedIn SEO is handled the same way you would apply SEO to your website. You can strategically integrate keywords throughout your LinkedIn profile to enhance your chances of the algorithm finding your profile and ranking your content at the top of search results.

If you want to rank high on Google search results, keywords are key throughout your profile!

To optimize your LinkedIn profile, start by creating a keyword-rich profile for your industry target words. Create backlinks and publish posts and articles with related hashtags. Make sure your profile is 100% completed.

Here are some LinkedIn SEO tips that you should implement on your profile today.

  • Know the right keywords to use (make sure that the keywords people will likely use when searching for your services is included in your job title and headline)
  • Keyword-optimize your LinkedIn profile (use keywords in your headline, summary and experience sections)
  • Clearly name the images on your LinkedIn profile (your cover image and profile photo and fill out the alt edit text on your image)
  • Strategically grow your LinkedIn network – LinkedIn has its own search engine. One of the ranking signals it uses is the number of connections a person has.
  • Make all sections of your LinkedIn profile public
  • Publish articles and posts in your niche area – one of the best ways to apply SEO to your LinkedIn profile is through content marketing. You can do that by publishing posts in your area of expertise, which also helps you to build your brand and subject matter authority.
  • Create quality backlinks -Building quality backlinks will give your profile page a boost. Try linking to your profile page from your own blog or web site bio.
  • Use hashtags – this helps to increase the visibility of your posts
  • Be wary of keyword-stuffing in your profile, you should only include keywords where relevant
  • Get as many endorsements and recommendations as possible
  • Keep in mind you are searchable by company, so if you list a company people will more easily find you
  • Add as many relevant skills as possible – those are each keywords too

If you need help with your Google search results and LinkedIn profile, don’t hesitate to reach out!

LinkedIn New Image

Did you know that you can now create LinkedIn posts up to 3000 characters versus 1300?

But remember that longer isn’t always better.

There are four types of LinkedIn posts available to users in the main LinkedIn home page: text, image, video and document – with each of them you can now add up to 3000 characters.

Make sure to break up your paragraphs into short, succinct chunks to make it easy for your readers to digest information.

How you say it is just as important as what you say.

The algorithm on LinkedIn favors posts versus LinkedIn Publisher articles – so keep this in mind.

Also, when you are creating a post like I am here, the algorithm also favors posts without URL links – LinkedIn wants users to stay on its platform. If you want to include a link, put it in the comments.

Don’t overuse hashtags either because you have more characters – 3 to 5 is the sweet spot. I’m presenting a free webinar on June 9 on how to use LinkedIn hashtags – join me!