The biggest thing lawyers forget is that they are marketing themselves 24 hours a day. If people know they're a lawyer, everything they do is a form of marketing for their practice even if they're rude to someone in a grocery store, they've just done negative marketing. Clients want you to understand them, says Foonberg. They don't care a rat's rear end about your ability to get an injunction. You have to care about the human being to whom you're talking.
Most people assume lawyers are interchangeable.
How much time you put into the care and feeding of clients is often affected by personality and regional norms of behavior, but the more you do, the better. But it could be a waste of resources. He cites a group of lawyers scattered around Virgina who pooled resources to run TV ads only to find that the commercials that played well in northern Virginia bombed elsewhere. There is also an abundance of online legal directories that help consumers find a lawyer and, as mentioned above, will often build a firm's website for free. Online legal services touted by many as the marketing wave of the future have also proliferated wildly in the last year.