(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!

A very useful function of social media is to allow you to keep up to date easily.  How?  Well:

You can follow blogs via RSS

If you use the Google homepage method, then on your Google homepage will be blocks for each of the blogs you follow with a list of the most recent three blog posts.  You can run your eye over them every day to see if there is anything you want to click through to and read.  If you follow lots of blogs then you can have separate home pages for each which you naviagte by clicking tabs.  Its fairly straightforward, but you need to register with Google first (worth doing as there are lots of other benefits).  To follow blogs click the orange square with the white curvy lines on it.  I have found it easiest to do using Firefox.

You can sign up to get blog posts by email

Not all blogs offer this, but if they do, and if it is a blog you are particularly interested in, it is worth doing.  You will then get sent an email of all their posts, which you can read quickly and easily in your email in box.  if you decide you don’t want them any more it is generally easy to unsubscribe.  (Note, if you want to get posts of this blog by email, there is a link to do this at the top of the side bar).

You can become fans of facebook pages

You will then see their updates on your facebook wall.  If you use facebook a lot this is a good way to keep up with what they are doing.  Again it is easy to block them or stop being a fan if you get fed up with it.

You can follow people and do searches on twitter

Many lawyers think twitter is stupid solely because of the name.  This is a mistake, twitter is a serious business application now.  You can follow people and organisations you are interested in and keep tabs on what they are doing and thinking.  There is also a very useful search function where you can search on words, to find out what people are saying about them.  Try a search on your firm’s name!

You can sign up for Google alerts

This is another benefit you get from registering with Google.  You  give Google the relevant words and every day they will send you an email summarising search results.  Use this for key words in your professional work niche, and also for your own name and the name of your business to find out what people are saying about you.  I have found out loads of interesting things from Google alerts.

You can keep any eye on updates on your LinkedIn home page

The LinkedIn home page is similar to the facebook wall, and you can often pick up what people are doing and writing about by scanning this once a day.

Thats all I can think of just now.  Do you know any other good ways of keeping in touch using social media?

To get exposure for your blog, it is really important nowadays to promote it via social media.  One of the best ways of doing this is to get other people to promote it for you!  You do this by giving them handy little buttons and links.  My theme, the Headway theme provides social media buttons to go in the sidebar, but it is also nice to have some links for people to click when they finish reading your post.

When my web designer did my Landlord Law Blog for me, she sourced the add to any button which has links to practically every social media site you could possibly think of.  However after a while I started to get annoyed at the way it kept popping up and getting in my way when I was using the site.  Then I read about Nicholas Cardot’s plugin – Nicholas writes a very good blog called Site Sketch 101 and you can read about his plugin here.

I did try his plugin for a while, but it did not suit the style of my sites, so I decided to go looking for a few more.  One recommended by a Site Sketch 101 reader was the sexybookmarks plugin, and I am using this (at the time of writing) for my Landlord Law Blog.

However there are others.  One that I quite like is I love social bookmarking, and this is the one I am using here  (at the time of writing this – I may change it later).  The social media buttons appear if you hover hour mouse over the text at the end of the post.  You can customise how they appear and the buttons that show.

So far as twitter is concerned (very important for promoting blog posts), many sites have the little green tweetmeme buttons at the top of their posts.  I had this too for a while.  However after reading the Site Sketch  15 best wordpress plugins post I decided to start using backtype tweetcount.  This has two advantages (1) readers do not have to authorise the program to access their twitter account and (2) you can change the colour of the box to match your site style.  I have made it orange on the Landlord Law blog and the ‘house blue’ colour here.

Have you used any of these?  Which do you prefer?  Can you click one of them please before you go on your way!!

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.

When I wrote my earlier post here, I said I had been doing a lot of research.  In this post I set out some of the sites that I have been using.

Probably the best blogging site is Problogger which is  written by Australian blogger Darren Rowse.  He is a full time professional blogger who apparently makes a very good living from it.  If anyone is contemplating starting a new blog, I highly recommend an evening reading the Problogger site.

He has also written two books.  One is an e-book called 31 days to build a better blog, and is excellent.  I bought it some time ago, and often read it when I am stuck for ideas, as it gives me inspiration.  Although it is an electronic rather than a ‘real’ book, this is actually really useful, because it makes it so much easier to follow the many links out.

The other book is called ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income, and is also very good although not, for me, as useful as the 31 days book. But if you are thinking of blogging professionally, worth a read.

Finally Problogger has now started a blogging forum, which I joined when it was very cheap (I think the price has gone up substantially since).  It also is very helpful, as you can ask questions if you are stuck about something.

The next person whose blog has helped me is Grant Griffiths, a former American Attorney who blogs as Blog for Profit. His son, Clay, wrote the Headway theme which is used for this blog, and his blog has also been a bit of an inspiration to me. Perhaps in some ways more so than Problogger, as he understands lawyers. He has now given up the law and runs a business designing blogs, mainly I think for lawyers.

In October 2009  he ran a series, called 31 days to Kick your Blog in the Butt (not a title, I am sure, that would have ever been chosen by an British solicitor, but there you go, its another country over there), which was also extremely helpful, particularly as at that time my web designer and I were building my new Landlord Law Blog. After his 31 days, Grant too turned his series into an e-book, which is also highly recommended, and you can buy it from his web-site, along with a work book and helpful book on twitter.  Although actually you can also read the blog series here.

Those are the main two sites that I have used.  However there are several other sites which I have found very helpful.  Blogussion, which appears to be run by a  bunch of school boys and college students, is a brilliant site and just shows that we old ‘uns can learn a lot from the modern yoof.    Copyblogger has some great posts on writing, although recently I have been finding some of them a bit irritating.  Lawyerist is another blog about legal blogs, interesting but not as good as Blog for Profit.  Remarkable Communication is a helpful blog on marketing, particularly online marketing, and if we are talking about marketing, we also ought to mention Seth Godins blog, considered by many to be the master of marketing, and whose blog is good for ideas.

You will probably have noticed that none of these blogs are British.  I haven’t really found anything similar here, mainly I suppose because we have not taken up blogging to the same extent as in other countries, or have not been doing it for as long (I set up my Landlord Law blog in February 2006 and I was one of the first legal bloggers here, Problogger (an Australian)  however started way  back in 2002).

What do you think of these sites?  Had you come across them before?  Have you found any sites you would like to recommend?

Linked in is the big social media service for business.  I joined it quite a while ago now, and although not essential, I think it is a useful service for lawyers.  Certainly it is not as useless as some solicitors I have spoken to seem to think (mostly these are solicitors who have little experience of the internet).

I suppose the main thing it is used for is to keep tabs on your contacts.  Once you are ‘connected’ to someone else on Linkedin, you get kept informed of their activity, such as whether they join a new group, update their profile, or post a status report.

I like this.  For example if I learn that X has a new job I can write (or rather email or send a message via the Linkedin system) and congratulate him, and perhaps wonder if I might want to use his firm sometime.  If Y has joined a new Linkedin group I will take a look at it and see if it is a group I might want to join too.  And the status reports are interesting as they let me know what people are up to.

Likewise my contacts can keep tabs on me, and keep up with what I am doing with my business or otherwise (at least insofar as it is recorded on Linkedin).

I have also through Linkedin, found and re-connected with several people I had lost touch with, which is always nice.

Another interesting aspect is the groups.  This is where you can join in discussions and perhaps through this get to know potential clients and colleagues.  I have not found any clients yet but I suspect that this is only a matter of time.  However I have enjoyed some of the discussions,  particularly those on the Law Society Gazette Group.

If you are a lawyer, have you used Linkedin?  What has been your experience?

NB My Linkedin profile is at http://uk.linkedin.com/in/tessashepperson

It will not have escaped the more perspicacious among you that (a) I have not blogged much for a while here and (b) this blog has changed its appearance a bit.

The two are not entirely unconnected.  I started this blog thinking that I might perhaps use it to support a consultancy service (should there be any demand for such a thing) to assist any solicitors who wished to develop their online service.

With this in mind (and also the development of my own services) I started doing a lot more reading about using the internet and social media.  As a result I discovered that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and I am still reading up and researching.

Partly as a result of all this, I decided that I needed to develop my professional Landlord Law Blog (which supports my online Landlord Law service), and change it over to being a self hosted WordPress blog.  This has now been done and the new blog www.landlordlawblog.co.uk went live at the end of November.

The new blog uses the Headway theme (affiliate link) which allowed us much more freedom in its design.  My Headway license provided for me to use the theme for two blogs, so I decided to use it for this blog also (it formerly being a Typepad blog).  Not being a proper web designer like Gill Bishop (who set up and designed my Landlord Law Blog) I have not done as good a job as her.  However, Headway has allowed me to produce a reasonable (albeit perhaps somewhat boring) blog design.   I will be working on this and tweaking it over time as I learn more.

Which I need to do.  Despite having spent much of my spare time this year reading up on the internet and social media, I feel as if I am just at the start of a very long journey.

So this blog is changing direction a bit, and I will now be using it to talk about my research about and work with the internet and social media.  It looks to be an interesting journey.  I hope you will come with me.

As most people will know, a blog is a sort of online diary – the name is a shorted form of weblog. The blog owner will blog ‘posts’ which will appear in a list with the most recent at the top.

Blogs have been around for some time, and most people are familiar with them. There are hundreds of millions of them around, ranging from blogs with just a few posts which no-one wants to read by someone no-one has ever heard of, to highly influential blogs read by millions every day.

Most newspapers will have at least one blog, and some will have many, kept by their journalists on particular topics, for example The Times and The Guardian. Perhaps the most popular of these is the American Huffington Post blog. Many TV channels will also have blogs, for example Robert Peston of the BBC and Jon Snow of Channel Four.

Many businesses now have blogs. Some will be anodyne company speak which will be largely ignored, others will be interesting and worth reading. You may have a blog for your firm. Many solicitors firms do now. I have written the Landlord Law Blog for my business since February 2006.

Many of the best known blogs are anonymous. Most of you will have heard of the blog by Belle de Jour, a London call girl. This became so famous that it was published as a book, and there has been a TV show based on it starring Billie Piper. Another anonymous blog recently in the news was that written by Night Jack, a policeman who told it like it was, which was closed down after The Times discovered and published his identity (after a court case seeking to preserve his identity failed).

There are many anonymous legal blogs, for example Nearly Legal which covers housing law cases, Geeklawyer an intellectural property barrister, and Baby Barista who blogs for The Times. Law Blogs are sometimes called Blawgs, for obvious reasons.

Although there are many more lawyers blogging now, we have come fairly late to the blogging scene. When I started there were just a handful, mainly John Bloches excellent Family Lore blog, The Charon QC blog, and Geeklawyer. There are far more legal bloggers (as you would expect) in America. Two well known ones are Susan Cartier Liebel’s Solo Practice blog (and since I first knew her, her consultancy for sole practitioners has turned into a University) and Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs.

But why write a blog? This will be looked at in future posts

Contacts. Social media is an excellent way of keeping in touch with your contacts. “But” I hear you say, “I can do that via my address book. Why do I need to do this on the internet?”. Well you can of course, just rely on traditional methods. But social media goes a step further and provides a more positive way you can keep in touch.

Firstly, there is less danger that you will lose touch with people as a result of their moving away or changing firms or telephone numbers. Assuming that they keep their Facebook or Linkedin account (and most people will), you can always contact them via this. And they will be able to contact you.

Secondly, if they are active in social networking, you can also keep tabs on what they are doing. For example you might learn that they have set up a new company, or are launching a new product. If you are active in keeping your account up to date, all your contacts will know, for example, if you develop a new service, or write a book.

This may open up possibilities for business. For example if you have just written an article on business tenancies, and one of your contacts is considering renting new premises, this may prompt them to instruct you and your firm to act for them. Or you may find that the office widgets they have developed are just the thing your office manager has been looking for.

Thirdly, when you connect with a contact online via social medial, you also get to see who their contacts are. All sorts of things can develop from this. You may get back in touch with someone you knew years ago. You may learn of someone offering a service you require, or they may find out about you. The possibilities are endless.

Contacts and people and making connections are at the heart of social media. It is a new way of connecting with people and can be a very productive one. Its worth a try!

Lawyers are often disdainful about social media, and don’t want to bother with it. “Whats the point” they say, “I’m not interested in knowing what people had for breakfast (twitter) or having connections with people or ‘friends’ I have never met (facebook, Linkedin, Ecademy etc).

Question answered! But see also Part 2 (to be continued …)