(This is an article which was first published in the Internet Newsletter)

The internet is becoming increasingly important for all businesses and law is not exempt from this.

I have been fascinated by the Internet ever since I discovered, on buying my first computer when setting up as a sole practitioner in 1994, that there was this thing called the internet, where computers could talk to each other through telephone lines.

I truly believe that over the next 100 years it will bring in changes of the same magnitude as those brought in by the development of the printing press and the telegraph. Already we are able to collaborate with colleagues in real time wherever they are in the world; blogging allows us all to be journalists and the growing popularity of ebooks allows us all to become publishers.

In this new world, the sole practitioner solicitor has a big advantage over his colleagues in larger firms. He (or in my case she) can develop new ideas and services without having to get them past hostile partners. My partnership meetings (of one) are invariably harmonious and generally productive!

If you have a good idea, it is possible, if you have the right skills or a good web designer, to get it online within days or in some cases, hours.

So how can the sole practitioner (or small firm lawyer) take advantage of the opportunities presented by the internet?

The membership site

I set up my membership site, Landlord Law ten years ago. At that time, I had to get bespoke software specially written, but nowadays membership sites can be built fairly easily from open source software such as WordPress and Drupal (the software Landlord Law uses).

If you are a techie, you may even be able to create your own site, using WordPress and plugins. There are courses online to help you do this sort of thing.

What can you provide in a membership site? My site, Landlord Law, is aimed at landlords, tenants, letting agents and housing advisors. The services provided fall into the following groups:

• Information – e.g. FAQ, articles and the like
• Documents – tenancy agreements, notices, standard letters etc
• One to one help – principally provided via the members discussion forum but I also ‘sell’ fixed fee telephone and written advice
• Casework. I offer standard repossession work, for fixed fees.

When Landlord Law was launched in 2001 case work was the biggest part of my income. Now it is the membership subscriptions which are more important.

I am lucky in having a small discrete area of law which lends itself to this subscription service model. However it is not the only one. Have a think about your practice. Is there any specific area where clients would appreciate (and pay for) an online service to keep them up to date?

Where you could also provide precedent documents and give some quick advice in a forum? Most people don’t want a great long written opinion, they just want a quick pointer, or perhaps a bit of reassurance that they are on the right path. You can do this really easily in a forum – and your answers will also help the other members and enrich the site generally.

An online instruction facility for basic case work is also worthwhile. For standard repossession cases it is not necessary for clients to come in and talk to me about it. All they need to do is give details and send over the documents so I can get on with it. My service also requires payment in advance. This means no bad debts which is a considerable saving in time and irritation.

Some case work requires more client contact than this of course, but I expect you do at least some work which would fit this model.

Blogging

It is no good just putting up a membership site and expecting hundreds of members. You have to market it and one of the best ways to do this is with a blog.

When people are considering paying for a service, they like to know a bit about the person or company providing it. A blog lets you show that you ‘know your stuff’ and are a suitable person to help them.

It will also help raise your profile generally, in particular in the search engines. Inevitably your articles will have ‘keywords’ relevant to your service, making you easy to find for someone searching for information in your niche.

There is a lot of writing involved in keeping a blog though. You also need to write in an ‘easy’ style which ordinary people will understand. You don’t want to come across as a pompous fusty lawyer type, as this will put people off.

(Note, you can see my ‘professional blog’ Landlord Law Blog here.

Audio and video

Writing is not the only option. You can record and publish audio ‘podcasts’. This is surprisingly easy to do, and the podcasts can be promoted via your blog and registered on itunes. People can then subscribe and download your podcasts regularly.

Lots of people enjoy listening to podcasts, for example in the car, while walking the dog, at the gym etc. Through listening to your voice regularly they will come to feel they know you, making you an obvious choice if they need legal help.

Or what about ‘vlogging’ – Video blogging? If you have a camcorder you can set this up on a tripod and speak to the nation regularly, updating them with news and comment on your niche. This can easily be published on your blog. You can also set up your own Your Tube channel and publish it there. It’s really not that difficult.

Twitter

People often think twitter must be silly, because of its name, and how can you say anything sensible in 140 characters? Actually you would be surprised but that’s not the point. If you have a blog, you need a twitter account because it is an important way to promote your blog posts.

A vast amount of twitter traffic consists of people either publishing a ‘tweet’ about their new blog post, or recommending (or ‘re-tweeting’) someone else’s blog post. You need to become a part of this. It needn’t take a lot of time (although it can do if you are not careful).

As a sole practitioner you have an advantage in that you can tweet for your business under your own name. People like to follow a real person with a real photo in their twitter profile.

Let’s talk technical

Blogs are quite easy to set up. You can set up a blog using the free Google software on Blogger in a couple of hours. However if you are serious about blogging it is best to have a self hosted blog, maybe as part of your firm website.

WordPress is the most popular blogging software. Many web hosting companies provide it for free and you can install it with just a couple of clicks. You then need to customise it with a ‘theme’ to give it an individual look.

I use a brilliant premium theme called Headway (affilate link), which has a ‘visual editor’ allowing you to change the appearance of your site without using code. You can further customise your blog with bits of add on software called ‘plugins’ of which there are thousands, for all kinds of purpose.

Or you can just commission your web designer to create a bespoke website and leave it at that, but I find that half the fun is messing about and tweaking my site.

Newsletters

As well as writing your blog, and giving out useful nuggets of information to your followers on twitter, you should produce a regular newsletter.

This performs a number of functions. It keeps you in the forefront of your clients mind, making you (hopefully) the obvious choice for legal work if they need it. You can also use it to sell your services and any products you may decide to produce (see later).

However remember that it is all too easy for people to consign your newsletter to the spam folder. Once this is done, all future newsletters will go there automatically, so they simply won’t see them. Try not to do anything which would make them want to do this.

If you decide to set up a newsletter it is a good idea to use one of the specialist companies such as Constant Contact, Aweber or Mailchimp. If you are worried about producing content there are firms out there who will do this for you, such as www.words4business.com.

Be your own publisher

If you write a book nowadays, you do not need to worry about publishers. You can do it yourself! With the growing popularity of kindle, ipad and other ebook readers, people are increasingly buying ebooks rather than paper books, and they are not hard to create.

The ebook can either be given away for free, maybe as an incentive to get people to sign up to your mailing list, or be sold via your website to form an extra income stream.

Many people sell their ebooks using an online service called ‘e-junkie’ which is fairly easy to use and very cheap. Alternatively you can add a shopping cart to your blog or website. You will need one which will allow you to sell digital downloads.

I have set up a whole new ecommerce business recently with my web designer specifically to sell my ebooks and kits, which we produce ourselves called Your Law Store. This has already started to make a modest profit

Conclusion

With the ever increasing complexity of our world, people are crying out for easy ways to understand information about the regulations which affect their daily lives. Lawyers are the best people to provide this. The internet is the perfect medium for providing it, promoting it, and selling it.

If you are a sole practitioner who likes writing, has keyboard skills and enjoys messing around with computers, the world is your oyster!

I spent much of last year studying and reading about social media and how it works. This year it is time to put some of this into practice.

I have therefore started an experimental new service for lodger landlords. My existing service, Landlord Law,  does cater for people renting a room to a lodger, but lodger landlords and regular landlords do not really have the same needs, and a specialist site will be better (and more affordable) for the lodger landlords.

The new site, www.logerlandlord.co.uk, (a wordpress site) was launched yesterday  by a blog post on my Landlord Law Blog, and I will be running a twitter campaign for the next month, using #lodgerlandlord.

On 1 February I will start a 21 day blog series, simultaneously in the Landlord Law Blog and on Lodger Landlord – Tessa’s 21 tips for Lodger Landlords – effectively giving away the ‘crown jewels’.  Hopefully this will encourage lodger landlords to comment and tell me what they need by way of legal services.  The Lodger Landlord site will then provide those services.

I have spent much of the Christmas and New Year period working on this.  The site design is powered by the wonderful Headway Theme (I have finally got version 1.56 and the visual editor to work, which is fabulous).  My web designer has come up with two stonking designs for the 21 tips logo and the site header.  Other than that the site has been created by me.

As regards the design, some time ago my web designer Gill gave me the numbers for five colours, which are the colours used in the Landlord Law site, and which I have subsequently used for this site.  This Lodger Landlord web site uses the same colours in a different way, plus a new paler blue, which is the colour used for the ‘wrapper’ – the bit between the sidebar, the header and the post areas and also the non active navigation areas, which are white in my other Headway blogs.  I had great fun working it all out.

The other expense (apart from Gill’s fee) is a subscription to Aweber mailing service.  Lodger Landlords are being encouraged to sign up to a new mailing list.  I use Constant Contact for my Landlord Law mailing list, but as I want to keep this service completely separate, I decided that Aweber (highly recommended by high profile bloggers such as Problogger) would be better.  You will see a banner for them in the side bar.  I have had three sign up for the new mailing list so far, which is not bad as the site was only launched yesterday afternoon.

It has been a lot of work but enjoyable work.  I have done most of it on my wonderful macbook in the sitting room, with my son (playing computer games on his laptop) and husband (reading Arthur Conan Doyle).  I am currently up to day 17 on the 21 tips and have done about 1/2 of the twitter posts.  The twitter tips are being scheduled in my twitter client program Hootsuite.

By the way, the XX days of tips idea is not wholly original.  I am following in the footsteps of Problogger and Blog for Profit who had similar campaigns.  I think I am the first person to use the technique for a law related service however.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

Update – June 2011

Over a year later (June 2011), the Lodger Landlord site is still going strong. In fact bearing in mind that I did no posts at all between August 2010 and June 2011 it has done really well.

Unique visitors (at this time) average out at about 100 per day and most of the work I do on this site now is answering their question in the comments.

However it has also bought in some real money – the lodger agreement has been a steady if slow seller, and there have been a scattering of advice instructions. The site has more than covered its costs and has made me a small amount of money.

The documents and other products are now being sold via my new Your Law Store site, and we have plans to develop this further.  When I do, I will be in quite a good place as the site is well dug into the search engines now and is easily found by someone doing a search on lodger.

If you have a web-site, you need some way to capture the contact details of those who visit, so you can keep in touch with them, and stay in the forefront of their minds. Then (so the theory goes) when they need a solicitor they will think of you first.

The standard way of doing this is by offering a ‘free’ newsletter. This must offer something of value, or people will not sign up. Most contain news items, articles and tips on the newsletter subject matter, and general information about the firm (i.e. new services, staff members, etc).

I have run a newsletter for years. I have two, one for members of my Landlord-Law service (a subscription site providing information and resources for private residential landlords and tenants), and a free one which anyone can sign up to. Although in point of fact they are actually more or less the same. The chief difference is that the members version cuts out the paragraph suggesting that they join up!

The main reasons why people like my newsletters are the tips (one for landlords and one for tenants) which are always at the top, and the news section. Readers appreciate being kept up to date and made aware of significant legal changes in their area of work or interest.

There are many landlords and tenants (and letting agents and solicitors) who signed up for my free newsletter who have subsequently gone on to become a full member of my service. However often this has only been after several years, so don’t expect results immediately. It is a long term thing.

If you are planning on doing a newsletter, it is best to deal with a specific area of work or client type (as mine is mainly for landlords). You can then concentrate on information and news which are important to your readers.   I find that the prospect of having to write monthly news items also makes me more aware and noticing of what is going on in my field. Which is beneficial for me as a specialist.

I think a general firm newsletter is less likely to succeed. People’s time is precious today and they will only want to read a newsletter if it is relevant to them. On the whole, people are not interested in your latest charity fundraising activities, the fact that you have three new secretaries, or your latest web-site makeover. What they are really interested in is “are there any new legal developments out there which will affect me or my business?”

If you are the person to inform them of a new legal development, and if at the same time you tell them about a new service you are offering to help them deal with it, they are more likely to come to you than another firm.

So the best way forward is to decide on which areas of law and practice your firm wishes to major in and provide a newsletter for that (although for larger firms there is no reason why you should not do two or even three specialist newsletters).