Seeing Jabez LeBret at last week’s Legal Marketing Association Annual Conference reminded me that I needed to catch up on my Legal Coffee Break podcasts – if you’re not yet familiar with it, the Legal Coffee Break podcast is a concise, less than ten-minute, update on legal marketing, technology, and other issues in the legal industry, hosted by GNGF founders Mark Homer and Jabez, with Jabez being the primary voice to this point.

Episode 26 discusses two things that are important to lawyers, and how they have changed with the advent of technology: referrals, and first impressions. Since Jabez talks about issues that I regularly address with my own lawyers, this one particularly stuck with me.

Referrals

As someone who espouses social media, something that I hear fairly often is “But am I really going to get BUSINESS from using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc?”

For lawyers, business development is all about the referral. And in the legal industry, referrals are still about word of mouth Anyone who really embraces social media will tell you that the “word of mouth” part hasn’t changed. What has changed is the process, and that’s what Jabez talks about in his podcast. Picture a typical scene: someone has a legal problem. They’ll go to someone they know, like, and trust to ask them for a recommendation for a lawyer.

That person will recommend someone that they have worked with in the past, or that they know well.

When that happens, the person giving the referral isn’t going to have the lawyer’s business card with them. At best, they’ll offer to email the lawyer on the spot to connect the two of them, or will send the person the lawyer’s name later.

As the person asking for the referral, though, what are you going to do? Either with the internet-connected mobile device in your pocket or the computer in your home later that day?

You’re going to Google the lawyer.

In the past, you may have relied only on the recommendation of the trusted person that you asked for the referral, or even if you did a bit more due diligence, you’d have asked around for a few recommendations, or spoken to a few people who had worked with that lawyer in the past. But now, we Google.

Read more: http://www.zenlegalnetworking.com/2016/04/referrals-and-first-impressions-how-technology-has-changed-them/