...your number one objective during this time is to maintain, if not increase, your engagement with clients and prospects.

For much of the country, many of us are learning how to work from home for the first time. Not only is juggling kids, spouses and pets an adjustment, you’re also getting used to a new home office technology and work station. The last thing you’re probably thinking of is business development.

But just because your environment has changed doesn’t mean your commitment to growing your practice should change. Many lawyers will find more time available to work on their marketing and business development. If that’s you, this list will give you plenty to work on to fill that time.

Keep in mind that your number one objective during this time is to maintain, if not increase, your engagement with clients and prospects. You’ll want to be top-of-mind and keep the relationship active as we work our way through this pandemic. Remote working is an opportunity to show a side of you that your clients might not see otherwise.

Our common dilemma of going through this crisis together can forge a foundation that allows us to get to know people in more personal and authentic ways. Make use of this opportunity. It will be good for not only your business development plan but your mental health as well.

Keep Calm and Carry On

A positive attitude and the ability to work effectively in your new situation is key to work from home success. These tips will help you keep a positive outlook and focus on what’s most important right now.

• Turn off the news – How many times do you need to hear bad news before it begins to affect your mood? Not many. Cable news today is a relentless stream of bad news and pessimistic warnings. If you feel compelled to stay informed, check out the news once a day but then turn it off.
• Get outside – Go for a walk or hike and get some fresh air. Being cooped up inside can chip away at your positive attitude and good mood. Take a 15-minute walk around the neighborhood and use the time to plan the rest of your day, brainstorm a project or matter strategy and think of ways to help others.
• Limit social media time – Next to the news, social media can be another source of negative or depressing news. While it’s a great place to fight with your uncle, debate politics or provoke a Twitter storm, it’s not always such a rosy and fun place to hang out. Regardless, it can be a big distraction so set a limit on how much time you’ll spend reading through your social media pages.
• Keep a positive attitude – Nothing attracts people like kindness and a positive attitude. Keep an upbeat attitude about the situation and share positive news with your friends. Look for the silver linings. Make a list every morning of the things you are grateful for and plan out your day by prioritizing the most important tasks and allocating at least a half hour for business development.
• Keep an organized work space – Clutter is a distraction. A clean and organized work space can help improve your productivity. Keep your work space clean of files and unnecessary materials. Make sure your computer screen and seating are comfortable and at the correct heights. This is key since fatigue and muscle aches from poorly placed equipment can lead to health problems down the road.
• Listen to upbeat music – Music has a surprisingly powerful effect on us, affecting our attitude, memory and even our sense of self. I prefer upbeat genres like Afro-Cuban, reggae, funk, and Latin music because my "sense of self" needs to dance. But you may find that a little Frankie Avalon or Dionne Warwick does the trick.
• Phone a friend – Reconnecting with an old friend or client can be a powerful pick-me-up. Reach back into the archives of your life and try to connect with someone you haven’t talked to in a while. You’ll find the experience rejuvenating.
• Mentor someone – Take someone under your wing and support them during this unusual time. Doing something for others has a powerful effect on us, emotionally and psychologically. Use the time to help them but also to practice your outreach and communication skills. Set a regular time to talk with your mentee, practice your active listening skills and prepare each call with a list of questions you want to ask.
• Practice mindfulness – Meditation and mindfulness are tools to help ease anxiety and depression and increase your ability to focus. Even if you don’t have anxiety, mindful mediation can help you focus, think more clearly and sleep better. It’s simple to do. Just sit in a quiet place, focus on your breathing or heartbeat and try to clear your mind of all thoughts. It’s like putting yourself in a "time out" - just without the grumbling.

Improve your Efficiency

There is no shortage of cool apps for work and play. I picked a couple that I think are cooler than most. They will help you be more efficient, in at least these areas. Some solutions are actually subtractions. That is, some apps need to be used less. Think of it as "quarantining" your most distracting apps.

• Office Lens - This is a popular application to make instant scans using the camera on your smartphone. Office Lens can be synced with OneNote and OneDrive so scanned documents, such as pictures, business cards, text and whiteboards – anything you can take a picture of - can be saved with ease. The app identifies the dimensions of the document you wish to scan, allows you to crop it, and make the image crisp and tidy. Images on whiteboards can be turned into Word documents and information from business cards can be instantly turned into contacts on your mobile. Google Lens is a similar app that detects and interprets objects, offering actions to the smartphone user based on its visual analysis of the object.
• Dragon Microphone - This app is more than five years old but still provides lawyers with excellent-quality speech-to-text options. The app allows you to dictate an article, create written notes of conversations and even dictate articles or book chapters. Dragon Microphone recognizes the speaker's voice, enabling the overall accuracy to improve over time.
• SimpleMind - Mind-map away using SimpleMind. Highly illustrative, this app provides the perfect place for mapping your thoughts on case strategy, marketing plans or process improvement. Almost anything that you’re working on that involves lots of ideas works in this mind-mapping app. Brainstorming and strategy sessions have few limits using this app because the pages have unlimited sizing capabilities and the ability to create more than one mind map on a single page. Users can also plug in useful images, video recordings, and voice memos to augment their mind-maps.
• SelfControl - Working from home is a challenge and fraught with distractions and interruptions. SelfControl blocks websites and notifications so you can get your work done. To get some SelfControl on your computer, just download this free app and put a block on any and every website distracting you from work. This app allows you to set blocks for portions of the day, set them for certain lengths of time, and automatically release access to those fun websites when the work is done.
• Screen Time – Don’t forget your phone. Turn on screen time to set limits on how much you use your phone’s app or limit which apps you can use. Calculator? OK. Instagram and Pinterest. Not so much. Avoiding these distractions, for some, can really add quality time for work and family.

Tips on Video Conferencing

Video conferencing, either group or one-to-one, is the ultimate social distancing tool. People are finding surprisingly new and fun ways to connect with others using their webcams. But now, you not only have to "dress for success," you have to pay attention to your surroundings too.

• Dress like you’re in the office – at least as well as you would for casual Fridays and at least from the waist up. Baseball hats will shade your eyes so avoid hats. Rule of thumb - if you wouldn't wear it in the office, don't wear it on cam. You want people to focus on you so avoid anything too distracting or overpowering. Don't eat while on video conference, for reasons too numerous to go into.
• Focus on lighting - Lighting is the number one area I see needing improvement. It makes a huge difference to those viewing you online. It’s surprising how many people don’t try to get good lighting even though the fix is usually simple. It’s all just a matter of where the light is emanating from. Lighting from behind is bad. Lighting in front is good. Light too close is too hot. Light too far away won't do the job. Watch for light that is behind you such as a window or a bright ceiling light. It may make you hard to see. Put a light behind your web camera so your face, expressions and background are well lit. If you have a window and can face it, natural lighting is the best light.
• Pay attention to your microphone – Use headphones with a built-in microphone, if possible. Using the computer speaker without headphones will pick up ambient noises like the garage door opening or kids in the background. Test your microphone before joining a video conference to make sure it works and your computer is detecting the correct microphone. Speak clearly and sparingly.
• Select an acceptable background - Look at what is in your background and make sure it is acceptable to you. Check the view screen so you know exactly what is in view from the online perspective. Your background can be a conversation starter. Think about the conversation you want to start. A wall-to-wall stockpile of toilet paper rolls behind you may not be the impression you want to make (I actually saw this recently). In my home office, I have a marimba in the background. The questions I get allow people to learn more about me and often leads to me learning more about them. Avoid backing up to "traffic lanes," where little kids and pets are constantly passing through. Try to maintain a separate space for your video conferencing/work space that allows you to close the door and get some quiet privacy.
• Technology – Learn how to use the technology in your video meeting app, including annotating to the screen, screen sharing, turning on the whiteboard, setting up meetings, muting, turning on or off your webcam, turning over presentation control, opening the chat dialogue and other tools. You don’t want to stumble through all that as you are talking to a client or running a meeting.
• Practice good online etiquette – Cross-talk is the most common problem in online video conversations, especially when the conversation gets excited or intense. People want to get their thoughts in and don’t wait until the other person has stopped talking. Wait for others to finish speaking. Raise your digital hand to speak if your conferencing app has that capability. Instant message the organizer to step in if one person is rudely monopolizing the conversation. Pay attention and don’t multitask while you are conferencing with others.
• Mute and hide – This sounds like a high seas naval avoidance strategy but it’s not. You can control your mute button and hide your video image by clicking a button on your video conferencing console. Learn where they are and how to use them. Mute is generally good (as long as you don’t forget to un-mute yourself when its time to talk) and video hide is not good (especially when everyone else is on video).

Improve your Marketing Materials

Many people find they have more time when working from home due to the elimination of a commute, less office cooler socializing and other time savings. Take advantage of that newfound time by reviewing and revising your marketing materials.

• Review your bio – Now is a good time to review and update your bio. Bios should have a clear focus on your practice specialty area and use the Six C’s to provide the social proof of your capabilities and experience. Use our six C’s of an effective bio as a checklist for what to include in your bio. The six C’s are client names (evidence of your reputation - get permission first), case studies (evidence of your results), community involvement (evidence of your social network), clout (evidence of your influence), content (evidence of your thought processes) and comments (evidence of your client service levels – again, make sure you get permission to list client comments and abide by your state’s ethics rules).
• Refine your value proposition statement – Value propositions should capture not only what you do and who you do it for, but communicate how you are different from others in your area of the law. Take a free, eight-minute video lesson exercise and quiz to learn the best way to create and use a value proposition statement here.
• Review profiles for consistency – Make sure your LinkedIn bio and your bio on the firm's website are consistent and both speak powerfully about the work you do. Make sure your practice focus is evident, you keep your experience up-to-date and make your contact information easy to find. It’s surprising how many lawyers don’t put their phone numbers or email addresses on their LinkedIn contact page. Don’t force people to message on LinkedIn; include your email and phone number. And keep everything up to date.
• Get client testimonials – There’s no better marketing strategy than the positive experience others share after having worked with you. Gather comments and testimonials from your clients by requesting them through your LinkedIn account or asking for them directly from your clients. Make sure you comply, though, with your state's ethics rules regarding client testimonials and endorsements.

Work on Your Marketing Plan

• Business plan – If you’ve been planning to plan but just haven’t gotten to it, now’s the time to make a plan. If you have a plan but haven’t looked at it in months, now’s the time to review and revise your plan. Keep in mind though, not everyone needs a plan. You should seriously consider a business plan if you fall into any one of the following situations: 1. You are changing the specialty area focus of your practice, 2. Your marketing is unfocused and lacks a disciplined approach, 3. You are in a hyper competitive area of the law, or 4. Your network of connections will not generate enough work for you.
• Get a list of industry publications – The Internet is a beautiful thing. There are numerous sites where you can look up the names of (and often the links to) publications of all types. They are most often organized by industry code. Spend a few minutes researching the publications of the industries in which you most often work. Then reach out to the editors and reporters to find out which topics they are most interested in writing about. Get their Twitter handle and follow them. If you can find email addresses, pitch articles you've written and make yourself available for interviews. Regularly share information with them on emerging issues and the trends you see in the industry.

Work on Getting Earned Media

Earned media is the unpaid coverage of you or your organization by third-party entities such as news and trade publications, either in traditional forms or online. You "earn" media when someone interviews you or places your content in their publication that you did not pay for. Because the media provides an implied endorsement of you, earned media is considered one of the most valuable forms of marketing. If you don't have established relationships with writers, reporters, bloggers and editors, it's worth the time to establish those relationships at the publications in which you would most like to appear.

• Subscribe to HARO – HARO stands for "Help a Reporter Out" and a free subscription puts reporter and editor interview requests in your inbox up to several times a day. Scan the list of posts for reporters researching or needing comments on areas you know about. Then reach out to the reporter or blogger and offer to comment on the article they are writing or researching. Oftentimes, you’ll get free earned media and often in publications or blogs you didn’t know existed.
• Meet with reporters and editors – Call or ask to meet with the local reporters and editors of publications and websites that match your target audience. Take them to lunch or meet them for drinks. Share your areas of expertise, suggest story ideas, and tell them what you know about emerging issues you see evolving in the space. Ask them for their insights on your competitors and what they see happening in the industry. Reporters are a rich and frequently untapped source of market and competitive intelligence.
• Write an article or blog post and break it up into a series – Taking the time to research and write an article can rack up the non-billable hours. So, break your article into as many separate articles as you can and schedule them to run in a series. Be sure to include a call to action and your contact information. You’ll reach more people for less writing time by publishing a series.
• Re-purpose articles for different audiences - Your articles often can be changed to appeal to different industries and audiences by making small edits to the article. a story written for one industry may have application to other industries.

Improve Your Outreach and Engage with Others

Staying connected is easier in an office than when working from home where you are balancing bored kids, school assignments and client work. But staying connected is as much for business development purposes as it is for your own mental health.

...commit to making at least three (video or phone) calls, emails or instant messages each day...

I recommend "three a days," which is a commitment to making at least three (video or phone) calls, emails or instant messages each day for the purpose of connecting and building relationships with others. Try to keep this exercise to people who are in a position to engage you or refer an engagement to you.

• Map your connections – You probably don’t know everyone you know. Make use of your downtime by going through your contact list, LinkedIn contacts and other address books and compile the names, company, title and contact info for everyone you know. Look at past deal sheets, litigation and other sources to recall people you've worked with in the past. Think through who is missing from your list including people from past workplaces, law schools or associations; people in the client or past client contact’s company, such as administrative assistants, department heads and C-suite executives; and people in your social or religious circles that could potentially be a source of work.
• Categorize and prioritize your connections – A big list of people that you know is a tremendous asset. In fact, I’ve always said you can tell a rainmaker by their Rolodex - it will be fat and ragged. But your contact list will be hard to work with if it is not segmented and prioritized. Go through your list and assign a category to each and a priority code based on the likelihood for them to refer work to you. Categories include referral sources, prospective clients, existing clients, dormant clients, etc. Prioritize them by their position and influence in their company, the need for your services, recent evidence of buying intent and other priorities to get to contacts best positioned to engage you. You should end up with 150 or so good-quality contacts that, if you do three a days, will take you one quarter to get through.
• Update and expand your contact list – LinkedIn is the global CRM system for business. Spend a little time each day connecting to new people through their LinkedIn profile. The more people you are connected to, the easier it is to reach second- and third-degree people. Search for companies, positions and your second- and third-degree connections to find people who you would like to get to know. Then, invite them to connect. Send them a message and make sure you include a "what’s in it for them" reason to connect. You can also search by company and get a list of the people in that company
• Prospect for new connections – Linked In can be good for meeting new people but is not well organized to show you everyone in the hierarchy of a company. Plus, very few people list their direct phone numbers and email addresses on LinkedIn. LinkedIn forces you to use their service to connect with the people you want to connect with. There’s also the problem of finding people who don’t or rarely use LinkedIn (which are fewer and fewer these days). That’s where Discoveryorg.com comes in. Discoveryorg.com has 95% contact information accuracy of the main C-suite positions in both public and private companies. The subscription is a bit expensive but it will pay for itself in time savings and business intelligence. You can also use it to make sure you have all the major department heads included in your CRM system or the organizational charts set up for your key client accounts.
• Make introductions – Who you know can often help the other people you know, giving you the benefit of having introduced them to each other. Make introductions to people you think should become acquainted and encourage them to meet by video call. Check back later to see how it went. Make at least one introduction a week.
• Provide training to your clients - Now is a great time to provide training to your client's employees. Many businesses are in pause mode but are still paying their workers. You can use a platform like eLegalTraining.com, to deliver training about laws that affect your clients' businesses. These systems enable you to easily load and share courses and online webinars, track performance, and issue reports to clients so they know who took the training and how they performed on quizzes and exercises.
• Conduct video calls – Phone calls are so pre-corona. Video calls are the next best thing to being there. With the number of free video-calling software available today, there’s really no reason why all calls can't be chalking up relationship-building face time. Learn to use the technology and include a link to your video conferencing session number in your email signature. There are lots of low-cost and no-cost services available for both group and one-to-one communications, including  Zoom, Got to Webinar, Go To Meeting, WebEx, Google Duo, FaceTime, Skype, Zoom, Tango, WhatsApp, Viber and Amazon Alexa, among others.
• Set up a game day with Kahoots – Kahoots is a gaming app that allow you to set up quiz and other games with friends, clients, partners or prospects. The free version allows up to 10 people to compete against one another. Create a quiz or game about an emerging issue, a particular case study or even about your client’s business. Correct answers are ranked by how fast the answer is submitted and scores are tallied after each question, making this perfect for those with a competitive side.
• Identify a cross-marketing partner – During a pandemic, when everyone is isolated and physically cut off from each other, there’s no better time and no higher need than to find a partner with whom to market your services. Find someone in a complementary practice area and brainstorm how you two can serve clients together.
• Prepare a "triggering" cheat sheet – Referrals from other lawyers is the number one source of work for most lawyers. You can make it easier for your partners and referral sources to refer work to you by preparing a "triggering terms and activities" list and sharing it with them. Tell them what key phrases or situations to listen or look for so they know when to introduce you to their clients.
• Reach out to conference organizers – Many conferences are postponing their conference dates and may have speakers who need to cancel their time slot. Send a note to the popular conferences in your industry and make yourself available to speak in any time slots left vacant. Prepare a couple of timely topics that you can present on and include learning objectives and a summary of the key points so they know you have a prepared presentation.
• Offer a free assessment – A tried-and-true tactic that can wedge an opportunity open, a second opinion or free assessment can give you the chance to demonstrate how you work and think about an issue or problem. The strategy allows you to ask questions which can unseat the incumbent provider by helping your contact think about the level and quality of service they currently get. Never criticize the incumbent provider. Just ask questions that cause them to think about the totality of the service they get. Keep in mind, no one switches providers until they first question the quality and service of the provider they currently use.
• Co-author an article – Nothing works to build a working relationship like collaborating on an article. Have a great idea for a topic or noticed an emerging issue? Reach out and find someone in your target client audience and ask them to author an article with you. Since drafting is the hardest part, offer to draft the article, let them comment and review it, and share the byline with them. The conversations you have with them will give you insights into how they like to work and what's important to them.
• Set up a virtual happy hour – Assume the bartender duties and invite clients and prospects to a virtual happy hour. Create a theme such as "If my business was a beer it would be a ……." Or, "The best wine to pair with my company is …….." and ask each person to explain their answer. You’ll learn more about each company and your contact and have fun in the process. Don’t forget to name a DDD – "designated digital driver" - for the event who knows the video conferencing technology.

Join a Business Development Distance Learning Platform

Distance learning platforms provide a number of benefits, including the opportunity to meet new people, learn new skills, work with a business development coach and tap the wisdom of those online. Distance learning platforms, such as the innovative new market entrant for lawyers at www.eLegalTraining.com, provide elearning courses, a documents library, group coaching sessions and referral networking opportunities.

Elegal Training is offering a special reduced-rate program during the coronavirus pandemic that allows lawyers working from home a unique suite of services for one low monthly price.

*

The former chief marketing officer of several large law firms, Eric Dewey is a business development coach for lawyers who has been helping lawyers and other professional service providers win new business for more than 25 years. His approach is practical, client-centric and practice-specific, using tools and techniques developed over years of coaching lawyers from every imaginable practice area through a host of challenging situations.

Eric is the instructor-coach on eLegaltraining.com and has coached and advised hundreds of lawyers over his career, including lawyers from firms such as Sidley Austin, Pillsbury, Nixon Peabody, Fenwick & West, Dentons U.S. and many others. Contact him here.