With the law school class of 2013 graduating in the next few weeks and a still-sluggish hiring climate, chances are that more than a few law school grads will spend the next few months watching lawyer movies and dreaming of hanging a shingle.  If you're thinking about taking the plunge into working for yourself, you could do worse than to watch the movies on this list.  Each of these movies has something to teach the aspiring solo practitioner—hunker down with a bucket of popcorn and learn while you watch.

#1: My Cousin Vinny: Be Prepared

This comedy involved one of the funniest courtroom scenes in all lawyer movies, and the reason for the humor is simple: an underprepared attorney.  While it's unlikely that you'd ever show up to court in a red velvet wedding usher suit, the nightmare of ending up in front of a judge without having done your homework is one that all too many young attorneys experience at least once in reality when they're starting out.

In order to make sure that you're not putting your foot in your mouth when a client's money or freedom is on the line, make sure that any time you go into the courtroom, you've prepared your case and know the law backwards and forwards.  Skimping on sleep is almost always a better strategy than skimping on trial preparation, if you're a young attorney.

#2: Erin Brockovich: Don't Disrespect Your Staff

One of the biggest lessons from this film involves Julia Roberts' role as the title character.  Roberts plays a paralegal who, in the end of the film, is responsible for leading to a huge multi-million dollar settlement for her firm's clients.  However, throughout the film, she is often dismissed because of her appearance and her perceived sexuality and lack of education.

Just because your law firm staff didn't go to law school doesn't mean that they aren't intelligent or can't have well formed opinions about the law.  Many of the people you're working with as staff may have as much or more experience with some aspects of the law as you do, and by devaluing their contributions, you may end up losing out on expertise that could have come in handy.

In fact, it's generally a good idea to be good to everybody—whether they're a paralegal or the janitor who comes in and vacuums up the floors late at night in your office.  It costs nothing to be nice, and in the end, your kindness is likely to lead to a better reputation and higher staff morale.

#3: Inherit the Wind: Know What Doesn't Matter

In Inherit the Wind, attorney Clarence Darrow represents his client, a teacher accused of teaching evolution in contravention of state law, for no money.  What's often forgotten is that he does, in fact, lose the case, and his client is required to pay the $100 minimum fine designated by law.  So—he lost, right?

Not from a marketing perspective, he didn't.  While Darrow only took a few cases after the Scopes trial, his star never shone brighter and he became one of America's most famed and celebrated trial lawyers.  Clarence Darrow knew that sometimes, being on the right side and being public about it can win you business even when the case wins you nothing at all.  It's not always about the money you're making today, or even whether you get the verdict you'd have preferred most.  It's not always about winning or losing.  Sometimes, it's just about getting your name into the right places and having it heard by the right people.

#4: And Justice For All: Know When To Turn Down Clients

With Al Pacino chewing up the scenery, this courtroom drama conceals a very clear lesson for new attorneys: know when you're not going to be able to represent a client.  In this film, Pacino's character represents someone so odious that he's forced, for the sake of his own sanity, to repudiate him in the courtroom.  Too many solo practitioners, when they're just getting started, feel the need to take just about anyone who walks through the door.  That's a fast route to burnout and to not doing the job for your clients that they need you to do.

You're better off letting some clients go than committing to clients who you will be unable to service effectively.

#5: 12 Angry Men: Understand What Juries Really Do

While 12 Angry Men is an older film, it actually may have more relevance today than ever.  In this movie, the jurors become involved in investigating the case from the jury room—a clearly illegal situation, but one which is allowed to happen in the play with no intervention from the judge or attorneys involved.

Today, the internet has made it easier than ever for jury members to do their own outside research.  Don't assume that juries are following the rules.  If you know that people can find certain information online, it may be best to make sure that you're inoculating juries against that information before they find out about it without hearing it from your side first.

#6: The Lincoln Lawyer: Do More With Less

In this film, Matthew McConaughey works out of the back of his vehicle, creating a kind of mobile law office.  For attorneys who are hanging their shingle in the middle of the current shaky legal hiring climate, this can be a great lesson—you can start with almost nothing and still get the case that will make your career.  You don't need to have money for a gorgeous corner office in a perfect neighborhood to be able to start your own solo practice.  All you need is ingenuity and a willingness to build your business from the bottom up.

#7: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: Be Part of the Community

This John Ford western stars Jimmy Stewart as attorney Ransom Stoddard, who tries to hang his shingle in a frontier town.  He quickly finds that in the Wild West, the law requires more than textbooks.  What he also discovers is that a lawyer who isn't really part of the community won't be accepted and won't get new business.  Only after Stoddard's character proves himself to be on the side of the townspeople does he become a man with a great reputation and a political future.  Young attorneys need to be in their community, not set apart from it.

If you're a plaintiff side labor and employment attorney, you may be looking for new ways to pursue your marketing plan.  In today's economy, it's more important than ever to have innovative ways to find new clients.  Fortunately for attorneys, the economy today has also led to employers slacking when it comes to following employment regulations—which means that business could be booming, if you know how to drum it up.  In this guide, we'll explore some strategies for employment attorneys who want to build a client base and grow their labor law practice.  Make sure before using any of these strategies that your state bar association allows these methods, and verify that any language you use in marketing materials is legal according to your state bar.

#1: Employment Law Information Sessions

One of the best ways to get new business for employment attorneys is to actually talk about the current rights that workers have under state and federal employment laws.  For example, illegal unpaid internships are a major problem for some young workers—but many have no idea that their job is illegal, or that they could be entitled to back wages and liquidated damages plus attorney fees.

This means that one of the best things you can do is talk at community centers, colleges, and so forth about the current state of employment law in the United States and in your specific area.  Helping people to understand minimum wage laws, laws surrounding overtime, employment classification, and prohibited discrimination can be incredibly useful—you'll be doing your community a service while you're building business for yourself.  These informational sessions can sometimes net you several clients all at once.

#2: Specializations—Consider Unique Issues

One of the ways that attorneys in employment and labor law can differentiate themselves from the competition is by starting to specialize in particular types of cases.  While if you're a brand new attorney, you'll probably need to take most cases that come through your door, consider specifically seeking out the type of work that you think you can do the best job at.  If discrimination cases are the types of cases you enjoy most and are most talented with, focus on those.  If enforcing wage and hours disputes is more your style, orient your marketing materials toward that focus.

#3: Connect Offline and Online Marketing

One of the things many attorneys today forget to do when making marketing plans is to ensure that their online and offline marketing are well connected.  Ideally, your online and offline marketing should be in a symbiotic relationship, each one working to help the other.  Too often, attorneys pursue drastically different marketing strategies on and offline, or only carry over their offline advertising through some quick taglines on their websites.

Keep in mind that much of your offline marketing can involve more than straight up advertising.  In many cases, you'll do better with more subtle types of marketing, like community involvement and sponsoring teams.

#4: Create Infographics To Make Information Understandable

One of the fastest ways to make content spread on the web is to put information into a handy, easy to read infographic.  Because labor laws in the United States are so misunderstood by so many people, it's easy to make an infographic that can start to tear down some of the more pervasive myths surrounding what workers' rights are and aren't.

Infographics will usually require a real graphic designer—you can hire a web design firm to create them for your firm if you don't have a designer on staff.  Trying to create an amateur infographic will usually result in substandard work, which is unlikely to actually take hold online.

#5: Use Social Media To Spread Information Virally

Once you've got some kind of content to spread—an infographic, an informational brochure about workers' rights, or even a really great blog entry that explains a complicated legal topic in simple language for lay people—it's time to make it spread out.  Try posting to social media channels for the best boost to your virality.  Huge numbers of people use social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and if your content is really interesting, it can often spread basically on its own after you give it the initial push to your friends and fans.

It's important to make sure, if you're using social networking to spread viral information, that you're using the network for more than just spreading out your content.  People who only spread their content online are often regarded as spammers, rather than as real participants in the social media environment.  It's much better to interact with your friends and fans in a genuine way, trading content and providing interesting information, than it is to use Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networks as purely a conduit for free advertising.

#6: Get Into the Local Search Game

One of the most important factors in your online marketing, no matter where you are in the country, is Google local search.  Google is used by a majority of web searchers, and today, four out of every five people who look for an attorney check online for reviews or other information about their lawyer before making a final decision about who to call.

Local searches are important to most people who do Google searches.  The vast majority of attorneys get their clients from their local area, and one of the best things about Google local is that it actually allows your links from local websites, like Chamber of Commerce sites, to count for more when keywords for your firm are searched for from locations near you.

#7: Remember the Basics: Customer Service

Customer service is absolutely critical for labor and employment attorneys.  Many of your clients may not really understand their rights, and are depending on you to be able to explain it in terms that they can understand.  By focusing on customer service and making yourself available to clients, you show yourself to be the kind of attorney who actually cares about client concerns.

Law firm marketing is never easy in these times, but with the oldest Baby Boomers approaching 70 years old, it's important for legal practitioners to understand how succession can impact their marketing.  If you're trading on the names and business of your senior partners, you'll want to have a succession plan in place to make sure that your firm lives on beyond any one person's contribution.  Keep reading to understand what you can do to make sure your marketing doesn't take a hit even when a partner dies or retires from practice.

Step 1: Start Marketing Younger Attorneys Sooner

Many firms make the mistake of making their marketing materials mostly about senior partners.  While it's important to market using the people in your firm with name recognition, it's also critical to ensure that your younger attorneys are being put forward in your materials.

For example, if you're going to draft press releases about cases, make sure that you're fully acknowledging the contributions of junior attorneys.  You may also want to include profiles of up and coming lawyers in your firm that have real prominence in your firm's external communications.  This kind of recognition can also be good for employee morale among younger attorneys.

Step 2: Encourage Attorneys To Engage in Marketing

In addition to including younger attorneys in your marketing materials, you should also help them understand how to incorporate marketing into their own days.  For example, attorneys should be made aware of the ways in which their activities for charities and the community can be used for firm marketing, and should be trained in how to market themselves and your firm in their daily lives.  Personal connections and referrals still account for a great deal of legal business, so it isn't enough to hope that online marketing alone can keep your firm afloat through a transition or succession.

Step 3: Train Younger Attorneys

Young attorneys shouldn't just learn about their potential role in marketing your firm.  It's also critical that your firm is working to train and educate young attorneys about current developments in law.  By keeping your attorneys trained and ensuring that they are doing meaningful continuing education, you'll keep them winning cases and gaining referrals.

Skimping on training expenses due to current cash shortfalls is like selling your paddle when you're already up a creek.  Make sure that you're always budgeting for sufficient training, or your succession is likely to turn into a disaster.

Step 4: Evaluate and Mentor Potential Leadership

When you've got a large number of attorneys working for your firm, not all of them will have the same potential to become a leader.  Don't assume that easy metrics, like number of hours billed per week or year, necessarily indicate leadership potential.  Just because an attorney knows how to bill hours doesn't necessarily mean they'll have the project management skills or interpersonal abilities to lead a group of people effectively.

When you find people who are interested in leadership and seem like they could become effective leaders, have a mentoring program in place to help these attorneys.  Make sure that there are open lines of communication with senior partners at the firm—it's better to cultivate talent that has “grown up” in your law firm's unique climate than to have to hire new talent at the time of a succession transition.  Attorneys who have existing loyalty to your firm and an understanding of your brand are worth even more at succession time, if your firm in 20 years is to have any resemblance to how it is today.

Step 5: Always Have a Succession Plan

The biggest marketing mistake that you can make during a time of transition is to lack a comprehensive succession plan that covers the death or incapacity of a partner.  While some firms don't want to think about these potential issues, the unexpected can happen at any time.  It is far better to develop a plan that will never see the light of day than to have to manage succession at an incredibly stressful time with no plan and several factions jockeying for their favored succession ideas.

Step 6: Maintain a Consistent Brand Image

Your marketing doesn't need to change significantly just because there's a transition occurring at your firm.  Keeping your brand image consistent will help your clients understand that your firm will maintain its high quality and client service standards.

Don't just have a brand image—make sure that all attorneys at your firm, from the most senior to the most junior, have a comprehensive understanding of the image you are trying to project.  Without it, you may find that your lawyers start talking at cross purposes with your marketing department, diluting your brand image overall.

Step 7: Have Young Attorneys Do More Online

One of the places where young attorneys can really step up to the plate in your marketing efforts is by creating a social media presence for your firm, or by creating blogs.  Often, these technological tasks are perceived as being a waste of time by senior partners, and older attorneys are less likely to have an in-depth understanding of online marketing technologies or the norms of internet communities and social networks.

This means that your young talent is in a perfect position to start transitioning your firm's marketing materials to the online world.  When your younger attorneys develop a social media presence, they make succession proceed more smoothly for business development.

Step 8: Know When To Seek Outside Talent

It's important to realize when you have a bench that isn't deep enough to continue effective marketing after your Baby Boomer partners retire.  When this happens, it's important to start making some lateral hires now.  There's no shame in seeking outside talent, but make sure that you have some plan for the continuation of your law firm's business at all times that doesn't rely on overuse of attorneys with insufficient experience or skill levels.

If you want to get ahead in the social media game—and, with over half of legal referrals now coming from online sources, who doesn't?—you need to understand the right and wrong ways to engage with the internet community at large.  If you don't seem internet savvy, it's easy to make rookie mistakes that can actually affect people's perception of your law firm for months or even years to come.  In this guide, we'll explore some basic do's and don'ts of the social media world, so that you know some best practices for online marketing while also learning some of the biggest pitfalls to avoid in legal marketing.

DO: Use Your Personal Connections

Some attorneys, especially those who are new to legal marketing efforts, feel like they shouldn't make too much use of their personal connections.  Because social media can sometimes seem to blur the line between purely social relationships and business or networking connections, it can sometimes be confusing to know what side of the line to walk on while marketing your business.

In general, its a good idea to have a personal social media account that is locked and only visible to your close personal friends—if for no other reason than to make sure that you have a place to put your personal observations that just don't belong on a news feed used for marketing purposes.  However, your business social networking accounts should also connect to people you know personally.

Why?  Because these personal connections can actually be one of your best sources of referrals.  When someone already on your friends or connections list refers a new client to you, they'll already be able to see the connection when they message you.

DON'T: Get Fake Followers

One way that many businesses have used to get a higher search ranking for their social media accounts is to purchase followers.  Many businesses online allow people to buy followers, often by the hundred or thousand.  However, these “followers” are really anything but—most or all of them tend to be accounts run by spambots, rather than by real people.

While these kinds of services can sometimes grant a temporary jolt to your search rankings, at the end of the day they don't really help you build quality social media backlinks.  They're the empty calories of the social media world—they seem like they're doing something, but there's nothing in them that will give you any kind of lasting nutrition.  If you're found using services to purchase fake followers, depending on the service you're using, you may also find your account suspended.

DO: Make Content To Attract Social Media Attention

You'll be able to market your content online better when you make it ready to go viral.  Don't make articles too long, and don't make them so short that people are left feeling like they wasted the click.  Design social media friendly content, including easy to read lists and quick analysis of current cases in your field of expertise.

DON'T: Make Up Identities to Post Content Online

While it may be tempting to use false identities to try to propagate your content, including by posting fake comments to blogs or by posting submissions to social bookmarking sites, this strategy is actually incredibly risky.  Called “astroturfing,” this fake grassroots lobbying for your firm is actually more likely to lead to people finding you out and thinking that you're being unethical.

If you want to post your content, do it ethically: be clear about who is posting the content.  You might try doing a question and answer session, or talking to people about common issues in your legal field.  Use your expertise to your advantage, rather than trying to hide it in the name of having “buzz.”

DO: Post Content Regularly

You should only join as many social networks and online groups as you have time to actively participate in.  While you may want to belong to some of these groups only to read, if you're making posts in a location, do so consistently.  Usually, blogs should be updated at least once or twice a week, and Facebook updates can be done one to two times per day without giving your audience pause—as long as the content is of sufficient quality.

DON'T: Repeat Content or Spam Followers

On the flip side, even having a few Facebook posts a week can seem like too much, if your content is boring and repetitive.  If you're just spamming people with what amount to ads, you're not using social media correctly.  Social networks are designed for two-way interaction—to talk with people, not at them.  You'll lose followers and friends by posting advertising instead of entering into dialogues, asking questions, and giving tips.  Follow other law firms so that you can see what other people are doing to talk to their clients without being perceived as spammers.

DO: Make It Easy For Site Visitors to Connect

When people connect to your website, they should be able to connect to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ accounts with just a single click.  If they can't, you may be losing out on valuable business opportunities.  Make sure that your website includes easy to use buttons that connect users to the individual and firm-wide social media profiles you're using to market your services.  Internet users today, especially younger ones, often see social media as the natural first place to check to make sure that someone's personality will mesh with theirs.  By projecting a confident brand persona in your social media accounts, you'll make it easier to get business from these web users.

DON'T: Require Social Media Connections For Content

While some companies think that it's a good idea to get followers by having contests or other content that requires “friending” to access, this is not overall a winning strategy for attorneys.  People who are looking for lawyers don't want to have to jump through additional hoops, and these strategies can seem manipulative and even petty.  You may find that forcing people to follow you leads to few new followers and a significantly increased bounce rate away from your website at the point where friending is required.

When marketers first realized that they could influence where their website appeared in search engine results, people clamored to figure out the best methods.  Unfortunately, many of those methods created the kind of search engine optimization that users hate: off topic, generic, low information pages that use keyword spam or other tricks to get into the top page of results.  Google changed how it ranked search results in 2012, which made a lot of search engine marketers unhappy.  However, even today, search engine marketing isn't just possible—it's better than ever.  In this guide, we'll look at how to create search engine optimization strategies that work by making your content more tailored to your audience, rather than by trying to outguess Google's spam detectors.

#1: Know Your Audience

One of the biggest things that attorneys need to know when they do law firm search engine optimization is that no firm needs to be at the top of the heap for very generic search terms.  You're never going to crack the top fifty for “lawyer” on Google—and that's okay.  Do you really want everyone in the country who wants a lawyer looking for you if you're a plaintiff's employment law specialist in Knoxville, Tennessee?  Probably not—you want people to come to your website who would actually be interested in your services, not just clicks that won't ever amount to anything.

By knowing what your ideal client is like, you can make sure that you're putting search engine marketing efforts toward getting those kinds of clients.  Knowing your audience ensures that you'll be getting the kinds of clicks you want, without getting those that you don't.  When you do have search engine keywords, make sure that they're specific and clear enough that you're sure to get the people you want to reach.

#2: Make Your Title And Descriptions Clear

If you're trying to get very clever with the title or description of your website, odds are it will just result in confusion for people trying to search for your legal specialty.  If your descriptions are not clear or don't use at least some search keywords that you'd like people to find your site using, you're not going to get the web traffic you've been hoping for.

Why?  Because Google places a great deal of weight on your title, descriptions, and even your URL.  Google assumes that these are the places where you will summarize what's on a page using language that will both attract people to click and draw in the right keyword audiences.

#3: Focus on Local Websites For Backlinks

Many people don't realize that Google actually weights search results higher that have backlinks from other local websites, when people search for local terms.  Why does the search engine work this way?  Showing that you can get backlinks from legitimate local websites in your area shows search engines that you're not just spamming—you're an actual part of your community apart from your keyword marketing.  They reward websites accordingly that are clearly doing things in their local area.

Consider seeing if your local Chamber of Commerce or even your municipality offers a listing service for local businesses.  This can help you get an easy local backlink or two.  You may also want to see if you could partner with other community businesses to build backlinks to each other, forming your own ad hoc affiliation of local businesses—even those as local as your block or street.

#4: Get Rid of Keyword Spam and Bad Backlinks

Keyword spam is so SEO 1.0—you can do so much better with quality content and legitimate backlinking strategies.  If any parts of your website still look like they were written by a machine that sprinkles in keywords, get rid of them.  If you don't, Google may decide that you have a low quality spam website and de-list you or rank you significantly lower than other similar websites.

The same kind of spam detectors are triggered by bad backlinks.  You might know the kind—ones that you pay for, ones that come from comment spam on blogs, or ones that were created through automatic reciprocal backlinking.  These kinds of links are no longer valuable, and can even hurt your website if Google decides to sandbox you.

#5: Add Fresh Content Frequently

If you're letting your website today look exactly the same as it did a year ago, congratulations—you're losing potential clients every single day.  In order for you to stay high in search results for relatively popular terms, even niche terms, you'll want to update your website on a relatively frequent basis.  Even if you're only putting together an update every month or so, it's still much better than letting a website become stale.

Google weights search results on websites that have been recently updated with new, fresh, original content.  If you're only reposting other people's content, search engines notice, and you won't get the same level of boost.  For optimum performance, you should make sure that you're updating on some kind of regular schedule.  Having an onsite blog can make this easier—by creating new blog topics every so often, you'll be updating your site and providing new content for people to search for with every new entry.

#6: Keep Search Pages Updated

When people start searching for you online, they might look at review websites like Yelp or mapping websites like Google Local.  If you want to get business, you need to make sure that you're actually keeping your information on these websites up to date.  If your offices change location, update your location in as many places as possible.  Make sure that you have a description of your business and what you do.  You may even want to try adding some photographs or video to make it easier for people to see what your office looks like and what they can expect if they sign up for a consultation.  All it takes is one piece of out of date information to send potential clients into the offices of your competition.

One of the toughest things about putting together a marketing plan is figuring out how you'll organize your team and put it all together.  Because smaller law firms often use attorneys and other staff members to cover some marketing responsibilities, it's quite possible that the people involved on your marketing team aren't full time marketing professionals and aren't used to organizing whole campaigns.  This guide will give you some tips on how you can make your marketing efforts more efficient and organized, making it much easier and faster for you to put together the marketing campaigns you're dreaming about.

Tip #1: Delegate Responsibilities and Make Goals

If it's too much work for one person, you're not helping anyone by trying to do it all yourself.  Put together a team of people who can work on your marketing campaigns, and look at what strengths each individual team member brings to the table.  Delegate specific responsibilities, and make sure that this delegation of responsibilities is written down and emailed to everyone after the meeting is over.

You'll want to make sure that every person has set goals and a set time to achieve them by.  If people have a delegated responsibility but no set goals, it's likely that they'll get bogged down in details.

Tip #2: Budget Enough Time

This is a place where many marketing plans start falling apart.  If you start with a schedule that's too optimistic, and don't budget enough time, soon you'll be falling behind.  When you fall behind, you start leaving parts out of your marketing plan, and it usually won't be the parts that you can most afford to lose.

Be realistic when you set your initial time expectations for your projects, for every team member, and if it's a task they've never performed before make sure that they have some additional time built in.  This will help prevent people from becoming overwhelmed, which can sometimes lead to marketing tasks being neglected.

Tip #3: Make Schedules For Every Marketing Team Member

Make sure that every person who is doing something for marketing has a schedule.  While you don't need to make it a schedule with specific times for specific activities, it should at least show what days, weeks, and months the person's marketing duties should be performed, and how long they're supposed to spend on those duties.

Everyone receiving a schedule should have input into it, and they should also be made aware that the schedules aren't set in stone.  It's much better to have some schedule flexibility, in case it turns out that part of your marketing plan is working significantly better or worse than you had anticipated.  Just make sure that people know that if the schedule isn't working out, they should come back and figure out one that will, rather than just letting work fall by the wayside.

Tip #4: Get Software To Make You More Efficient

Purchasing some software packages can make it significantly more easy for you to do the kind of marketing you want to do in the time you have to do it.  For example, if you download software that helps you post to social media websites and keep track of what people are saying about you on social networks, you'll be saving a great deal of time over using each site individually and trying to search for mentions of your own firm's name.

If some part of your day seems like it's being wasted on website inefficiency, it's a good thing to ask whether there's some software that can actually help out and make it easier for you.  You're probably not the first or the last person to have a problem like yours, and programs will often exist for the exact problem you're having.

Tip #5: Do Analytics On a Scheduled Basis

You should periodically analyze your marketing campaigns to make sure that they're working according to plan.  Online marketing makes this particularly easy, with programs like Google Analytics.  Too often, analytics is the first thing that falls by the wayside when people get busy with other aspects of their job.

This is a huge mistake: you won't know how to achieve your goals if you don't look back and see how well you've done with techniques you've already tried.  Your data is incredibly valuable—by just letting it languish without paying any attention to it, you're wasting time and money.  Using your data effectively means that when you spend money on marketing and advertising, you're spending it on the right sites, the right times, the right demographics.  Without those analytics, you're like someone fumbling in the dark toward a good idea.  Let analytics be your flashlight.

Tip #6: Think Like a Scientist (A/B Testing)

A hallmark of the scientific method is also part of today's online marketing world.  A/B testing is basic experimentation in a scientific way.  The biggest part of A/B testing that it's important for marketers to get right is the idea of changing only a single variable at a time.  If you change multiple variables at once, you won't know which one actually affected your conversion numbers, bounce rate, or anything else you decide to test for.

It may seem a little monotonous to only change one thing at a time, but in the end, you'll have significantly better data to work with.  Your data is much less likely to lead you to the wrong conclusion when you're rigorous in your A/B testing.

Tip #7: Get Regular Progress Updates

Members of your marketing team, once they have goals and schedules, should be prepared to send regular progress reports that tell you how close they're coming to achieving their goals.  This way, if someone starts to fall behind, you can figure it out quickly and re-budget time more realistically.

Once a week should usually be enough for progress updates, and someone with a minor or specialized role may only need to update the team every two or four weeks.  Regardless, make sure there is a progress updating schedule so that everyone knows who's doing what and how much work has already been done.

One of the most successful television and film franchises of all time, Star Trek has an obsessive fan base and stories that are often timeless.  In this guide, we'll take a look at lessons that law firms can learn from the show's characters or its marketing—lessons that are just as useful in today's pre-warp society as they are in the future of the Federation.

#1: Pick Your Team Wisely

There have been several different Star Trek series, and while fans often debate which one is best, their debates tend to focus on one main thing: more than the plots of the episodes, fans care about the characters and their dynamics.  That's why, while some fans will agitate for the Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic and others will wax rhapsodic over the Picard leadership style, almost no one advocates for Voyager, which had a team that lacked cohesion.

The best Star Trek crews have members that balance each other out.  Having a crew of all Spocks would likely lead to significant problems, but so would a crew of all Kirks—put together, they're a dynamic command duo that can respond to almost any problem.  When it comes to choosing law firm partners, keep this kind of balancing act in mind.  Often, having someone as a partner who balances out the qualities of the other partners is a better move than choosing someone who is a lot like the people already in partnership positions.

#2: Have Your Own Prime Directive

In Starfleet, the Prime Directive is not to become involved with societies that haven't yet discovered faster-than-light travel technologies.  This Prime Directive is important because Starfleet doesn't view itself as having a mission to interfere in societal development of very early societies—they want to be recognized as equals or near-equals, not gods.

Law firms have different priorities from Starfleet, of course, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't have a Prime Directive.  What is the one thing that is at the base of your firm's ethical code?  It's a good thing to think about—the ethical principles that unite your firm and are a value you'd like every attorney to uphold.  By having your own Prime Directive, you ensure that your firm's culture is built around this ethical commitment.

#3: Strong Leadership Matters

On Star Trek, leadership is key to mission success, and leaders must take responsibility for the people under their command.  In many situations, the captain of the ship can even be punished for actions taken by an underling.

The same holds true in law offices.  If an attorney or even a legal secretary makes a bad mistake, the people who will be held responsible aren't just the people who made the mistake—they're also the principals of the firm.  Because of this, it's critical for people who are in charge at your firm to know what's going on and present strong leadership skills.  Without them, you're much more likely to have personnel who break the rules and cause embarrassment to your firm.

#4: Push the Boundaries

One of the reasons that Star Trek has enduring cultural relevance is that it has often taken social issues into account and pushed boundaries in the topics it covers.  In the same way, taking cases at your firm that push the boundaries and are in territory other people have barely covered is a great way to get your name out there and start getting the kind of recognition you want.  When you go “where no one has gone before,” other people can't help sitting up and taking notice.

#5: Know the Value of Your Fan Base

Initially, when Star Trek fans began having conventions, Leonard Nimoy, who played Spock, was irritated by the way that many of his fans conflated him and his character.  He penned an autobiography entitled “I Am Not Spock” to clarify who he was as a human being.  However, years later, he became more willing to engage with fan communities and wrote a second autobiography, this one called “I Am Spock.”

Your loyal clients are your fan base, and it's important to cater to them in ways that make them likely not only to continue being your fans, but also to bring new fans into the fold.  Having a great base of loyal clients will keep your firm going even through tough times, while if you're just depending on ads and clients who come in for a single case, you are likely to have significantly more volatility in your levels of new business.

#6: Don't Try to Change the Past

In several different Star Trek episodes and movies, someone changes the past, often trying to make it better.  However, changing the past is almost always an incredibly dangerous and foolhardy thing to do, full of unexpected consequences.  In the real world, of course, you can't change the past—but that doesn't stop a lot of people from dwelling on their previous mistakes and wasting time wishing that they could have done things in the past differently.

The past is over and done with, and you can't change it—what's more, you probably wouldn't really want to.  Instead, focus on going forward, and resolving the situation using the tools at your disposal (which probably don't include any time machines).

#7: Don't Underestimate Your Rivals

Often, the Enterprise ends up in the biggest trouble when its captain underestimates a threat or responds to it too late to solve it easily.  When you market your law firm, it's important not to underestimate your competition or assume that they aren't capable of using the same strategies as you are.

Whenever you're implementing a new marketing strategy, try to stay several steps ahead of your rivals by thinking of ways that they might respond and how you can, in turn, respond to that response.  For example, you may want to think about what you would do if your rival's response to a successful new way of marketing your firm was simply to start using that same method themselves.

His name is synonymous with Elizabethan times.  So why would any legal marketer look to the Bard of Avon when trying to create a marketing plan?  Think again: Shakespeare has one of the most enduring brands of all time.  If you want your legal marketing to stand the test of time, you can do worse than to think about how Shakespeare's lessons apply today.  In this guide, we'll look at wisdom from the Bard's life and plays that can put your law firm on top of the marketing heap.

#1: Know Thy Audience—And Play To the Cheap Seats

In his time, Shakespeare's plays were beloved by all, from the poor, who occupied places close to the stage, to the Queen herself.  No one knew this better than Shakespeare, who made sure that his plays were created with his audience in mind.  Shakespeare today may seem like a playwright whose language is tough to unravel, but in his day, he was speaking with the vocabulary of the common people.

Shakespeare is great proof that even when you're talking about important and nuanced aspects of the human condition, you can still talk to regular people and even make them laugh from time to time.  Legal marketers need to learn this lesson: you don't need to be stuffy to talk about the law, even when the legal issues are very important.  Being conversational and interesting will always keep an audience longer than stuffed-shirt seriousness.  A well-placed quip or two can bring a smile to a potential client's face without being flippant about the legal issues at hand.

Don't be afraid to talk to the people who are really your clients.  If you know that your clients are, on average, high school graduates but not college graduates, you should make sure that you're actually speaking with terms that everyone reading your site can understand.  This doesn't mean talking down to anyone—it means relating and being someone that your audience feels can understand their concerns and lives.

#2: Get People Speaking Your Language

From “eyeball” to “lonely,” many words we take for granted in the English language today were actually coined by Shakespeare.  He also created great turns of phrase that have become part of our lexicon.  You don't have to be Shakespeare to use language inventively.  Framing the issues your way, and making sure that the way you frame the issues drives clients straight to your office, is critical to getting conversions from your website content.

Make sure that your language plays to your strengths and sounds a lot like how you actually speak.  People tend to naturally mimic a strong linguistic style, so by speaking in your own unique way in your content, you automatically make people think a little bit more like you.

#3: Everybody Has a Story—And Great Stories Stick

Shakespeare mostly told stories of great kings and nobility, but the plays tell the stories of other characters as well.  Even minor characters in Shakespeare plays are often very memorable, because each of them has enough characterization to be real and recognizable, even hundreds of years later.  Did you know that the page people are most likely to convert after reading is your attorney biography page?  That's why it's absolutely mission critical to make sure that you're telling real, interesting stories about each of your attorneys.

Dry titles, memberships, and degrees can be important to some people, so you should make sure they're included somewhere on your biography page.  However, consider having them in a side column or as bullet points after a more narrative biography.  Don't just tell the basics of your attorneys' lives.  Talk about their origins, their hopes, their motivations.  The more that you can make lawyers into relatable human beings, the more likely it is that a potential client will call you instead of your competitors.

#4: Draw From The Past, Use Your Own Twist

Students are often surprised to learn that Shakespeare didn't really invent the vast majority of the stories he told.  Instead, he drew inspiration from great stories of the past, and added his own style to them.  The same is true for law firm websites.  You don't need to reinvent the wheel in order to create a memorable site that has a high conversion rate.

This means that you probably shouldn't try a crazy new introduction for your website that takes 30 minutes, or turn your attorney biographies into an alternate reality game—stick to the basic format of websites that work, because consumers know how to navigate those basic structures, in the same way that Shakespeare's audiences knew the basics of the stories he was telling.  Then, be inventive within those structures—get creative in how you link to videos and integrate multimedia aspects of your website.

#5: Be Willing to Evolve With the Times

Shakespeare's work from the earliest parts of his career looks very different from what he wrote later on.  That's because he was evolving in response to what people asked of him and what the changing demands of the times were.  Today, audience demands change more quickly than ever, but we're lucky—we also have the ability to analyze our audience and determine what's working in a much more scientific and accurate way than Shakespeare could ever have imagined.  Make sure that you're monitoring trends and your own progress so that you know when it's time to evolve and what direction is most productive to evolve in.

#6: Know Your Flaws, Or Be Destroyed By Them

Shakespeare's tragic figures all have flaws, and in the end, those flaws lead to disaster and ruin.  However, what many people don't talk about is that these flaws destroy the characters precisely because the characters are not aware of their flaws.  Many of Shakespeare's comedic characters are flawed just as much, but they tend to recognize those flaws and work with them.  Learn from their example: no one's perfect, and when you know what your law firm's weak spots are, you'll be better at both working around them and working to improve them in the future.

Most attorneys today know that specialization is the watchword when it comes to practice areas.  But did you know that specialization can be just as important when it comes to your marketing plan?  Figuring out who you want to be online and where you want to focus your marketing dollars will decide what kind of plan your law firm should develop.  In this guide, we'll explore different ways for your marketing to become specialized and work better for your firm.  Remember that doing one type of marketing really well will almost always give you better results than trying to be a jack of all trades and a master of none.

#1: The Social Butterfly

Social networking websites have exploded onto the internet scene in recent years, and with good reason.  They allow people to connect with friends, relatives, and business networking connections.  What's more, they're an incredible platform for targeted marketing and advertising.

If you decide to be a Social Butterfly, you should be active on several different social networking websites.  While it's a good idea to use paid advertising on a number of these sites (and many offer very specific and selective targeting options), it's an even better idea to take advantage of what they offer for free.  Rather than advertising, consider social media channels to be a place where you can show your brand personality and build customer relationships.  The Social Butterfly doesn't need to talk him or herself up all the time directly—instead, by being friendly and building relationships online, they make it easier to get referrals and new business.

#2: The Vocal Local

Vocal Locals know that most of their clients aren't just searching for “employment lawyer” or “bankruptcy attorney.”  They're searching for “employment lawyer in Richmond” or “bankruptcy attorney in Seattle.”  What's more, the Vocal Local knows that search engines today are smarter than ever: they actually check to see whether you've got backlinks from just generic websites, or actual local websites that are important to your community.

The Vocal Local doesn't just advertise and market his or her services online.  Instead, they know that they need to get out into the world and get involved, and view their online marketing as an extension of their real world presence in their local community.  Becoming a Vocal Local means looking for local websites where you can build backlinks, and making sure that you're getting press coverage in local media.  These things will all help you to build your search rank and become more easily visible to potential clients.

#3: The Big Bad Blogger

Some of the most successful attorney marketing strategies in the last several years have come when lawyers have a truly great idea for a blog.  If you want to be a Big Bad Blogger, you need to make sure that you're not just copying an idea for a blog from someone else.  You'll want to say something that's actually unique and interesting.

Big Bad Bloggers don't just blog on their own website.  They take guest blogging opportunities (and make guest blogging opportunities on their blog for other people), and they make real comments on other people's blogs, not just link spam.  A Big Bad Blogger can end up getting media appearances and incredibly good publicity, all with a free blogging website.  This is one of the best forms of legal marketing, but it's not for everyone: if you don't have a good idea, or you don't think you'll be able to consistently update a blog with fresh, interesting content that keeps people coming back, you should probably try a different marketing specialization strategy.

#4: The Backlinks Broker

Backlinks Brokers know that the best way to move ahead in search rankings is to have quality backlinks.  Backlinks Brokers may have used low quality backlinks in the past, when those still worked to generate good results in searches, but they know that times have changed.  With Google Penguin and Google Panda killing off most search results from websites that used easy to get, contextless backlinks, today's Backlink Broker is prepared to make their backlinks contextual and high quality.

Today, the Backlinks Broker can be found actively creating relationships with people who run other websites, trying to get backlinks on various sites. The Backlinks Broker may comment on some blogs and social media postings.  However, a good Backlinks Broker will make sure that their comments never appear to be spam or direct advertising.  Instead, keep it subtle, and make sure you're providing good information and a real reason for people to want to follow the backlinks that you're creating.

#5: The Storyteller

Attorneys are often talented storytellers, especially trial attorneys.  This is one reason that as a lawyer, you might want to consider making your marketing personality The Storyteller.  Storytellers use their powerful storytelling primarily on their website, and then use that storytelling to captivate potential clients.  By telling stories on your website of how you have worked for your clients, and showing your audience a narrative point of view, you'll make them substantially more likely to see you as a human being—easier to call, easier to schedule a consultation with.

Storytellers may need to use paid advertising and marketing to get people to notice their website.  Contextual, targeted advertising can be one great way to make sure that you're only getting your ad in front of the people who are most likely to want to see it.

#6: The Vigilant Analyst

Another way to market your services is to start with your existing marketing plan, then work on analyzing it.  The Vigilant Analyst is constantly checking where people are clicking from and thinking about how to make sure that those strengths are catered to.

Vigilant Analysts tend to be the types of attorneys who are more quantitatively based—the ones who don't mind crunching numbers and dealing with large sets of data.  Typically, Storytellers and Vigilant Analysts are not the same people, although when an analyst can also tell amazing stories, it's a recipe for an unbeatable website that will garner conversions consistently.