Are You Pivoting?

Pivot should be at the center square of your COVID cliché bingo card. The prevailing wisdom is that the businesses likely to survive and thrive in the disruption that is the new normal are those with the agility to move to a Plan B. (Bingo!)

And while, yes, it is extremely awesome that craft distilleries are making hand sanitizer instead of whiskey right now, it’s less than clear what pivoting actually looks like for law firms and other providers of professional services. (Also: let’s not give up on the whiskey entirely, OK?)

As much as we might wish to redeploy our resources to vaccine research or emergency medicine, our skill sets are not necessarily transferable to the work of getting test kits and ventilators to where they’re needed most. So, what can we change in order to be as effective as possible in the wake of pandemic and recession?

At Page 2, we’ve been doing some pivots of our own, even as we advise our clients on the adjustments they can make to their communication strategies. Here’s a quick list of some of our newest offerings:

LinkedIn for Lawyers

In working our clients on their social media strategies, we’ve always noted the importance of LinkedIn as a platform for some of the fundamental work of business development. Beyond optimizing a firm’s LinkedIn presence, through your company page, the true value of LinkedIn comes with the combined power of individual attorneys reaching their own networks of connections. We typically offer live “brown bag lunch” style training sessions for attorneys at our client firms to help facilitate this. Because those aren’t happening, we’ve moved all of that content onto a series of six 20-minute video sessions ranging from beginner, with setting up your profile, to advanced, with engaging directly with your network of contacts. Each session includes any relevant notes around attorney advertising and ethics rules that govern electronic communications.

Strategy Audits

Our consultants provide external perspective and information to help law firm marketers and leaders make decisions about which initiatives to move forward with, what to change and what to put on hold. Because we’re closely connected to industry journalists and experts, we can offer sound advice on how messages will be received in the current environment. Though we’ve always included this guidance in the suite of services we offer to our long-term retainer clients, we’re now making our communication strategy consulting services available at an hourly rate to firms of any size who could use the extra support.

Zoom Media Skills

With so many media interviews now taking place over Zoom and similar video platforms, we’ve redesigned our signature media training offering to focus on the specific skills and techniques necessary to communicate effectively with reporters and TV audiences through this new medium. As always, our training can be fully customized to include help on message development particular to your needs and to support client webinars, in-house “town hall” meetings and other forums as well as traditional media interviews.

Coaching for Telephonic Arguments

As our trial lawyer clients navigate the challenge of delivering oral arguments via conference call, we’ve quickly assembled notes on best practices and potential pitfalls to be aware of in this new-but-also-retro area of trial practice. We can deliver this training and coaching to your team with the same customization and just-in-time flexibility that has always characterized our CLE-certified media training for lawyers.