The COVID-19 coronavirus crisis of 2020 is a unique event in American history. Literally, our economy went from full steam ahead and close to full employment to about 80% shutdown within less than a month.
In this article, we’ll discuss what you should do about your law firm marketing both in the short term and in the six to twelve month period to come. Continuing business as usual will waste your valuable marketing dollars and not get you the results you need.
Currently – as of early April, 2020 – governors is most states have issued “shelter in place” orders and entire industries have been shut down. Transportation, hospitality, retail, personal service, food service and many others are either closed or operating with skeleton staffs.
We are being told that anti-viral medications and vaccines are being tested but whether we will be able to reopen the economy in six weeks or eighteen months is unknown. Therefore you should plan for the worst, i.e., an eighteen month slowdown but be prepared to ramp up your marketing sooner if conditions so allow.
Like other businesses, this crisis will negatively impact attorneys, certainly in the short term. If you handle accident injury work, your business will slow down because fewer people are driving. If you handle domestic relations, your potential clients are not likely to have the money to pay legal fees. Many types of litigation are stayed and because the courts are closed, there will be no jury trials.
Given the slowdown or shutdown of many sectors of the economy, your marketing efforts must change. If you are driving traffic to your website using paid advertising like pay per click, you or your marketing consultant should monitor your results carefully.
Presumably you are tracking your cost per lead and cost per new client acquisition. In theory, your cost per lead should go down as fewer attorneys will be bidding for the top spots in Google and Bing’s paid advertising markets. Don’t be surprised, however, if Google and Bing try to keep prices artificially high.
Similarly, your cost per client acquisition will likely go up since there are fewer potential clients out there for most practice areas.
Further, your point of diminishing returns with regard to client acquisition will likely go down. Whereas six months ago, for example, your marketing dollars were most efficient bringing in fifteen cases per month, now your peak efficiency may be eight or nine cases per month. The cost of bringing in viable cases in excess of your diminishing return number may get very expensive very quickly. If you are not sure about how to analyze your numbers, talk to your CPA or a trusted financial adviser.
If your new business has slowed to a trickle regardless of what you are spending in advertising, don’t hesitate to put a stop spending money. If you have to furlough employees, do it unless you trust the government’s PPP program to subsidize your payroll. I recently spoke to a colleague who is paying a receptionist $50,000 per year when there are no calls and he is wondering what to do. At the very least, he should look into assigning new tasks for his receptionist – but it makes no sense to pay someone to sit there looking at the wall.
Over the past few days, I have begun to see articles and videos from legal marketing vendors suggesting that you need to look at entering into new practice areas and totally change your business model.
I think that this type of thinking is premature at this point and to some degree self serving. After all, if you are going to enter and ramp up a new practice area, presumably you are going to need marketing advice and who better to provide a costly and robust marketing program than the same person waving the panic flag.
This is not to say that you ought not look at other streams of revenue but those evaluations need to be measured and thoughtful, not driven by desperation.
Understand that changing the focus of your practice is not an endeavor that can be done overnight. For example, in my practice I represent people in need of personal bankruptcy and claimants applying for Social Security disability benefits.
Setting aside the question of whether either of these two practice areas have the potential for growth (and there are arguments pro and con for both), you would find it difficult to learn the practical elements of either of these areas of law quickly. And I can tell you that substantively, both of these practice areas are relatively easy to handle.
However, there is no online course or book that can impart into you fifteen or twenty years’ of experience. And more likely than not by the time you had enough cases to generate a stream of revenue, the current crisis will be over and your existing practice areas will be viable again.
I can also tell you that currently, both of these practice areas remain slow. It would seem logical that bankruptcy may pick up but generally speaking, bankruptcy case filings rise when people are working and overly optimistic about their ability to handle credit. Filings tend to drop when people are unemployed and have nothing to lose.
If it turns out that this crisis lasts longer than expected and there are practice areas that do grow (i.e., SBA consulting or business restructure bankruptcy) you can be certain that hundreds if not thousands of other lawyers will follow the herd and begin marketing, leaving little room for anyone to make a profit.
In my office, we are using the slow time to prepare our existing Social Security cases for hearing and to reach out to our clients, one by one. We are also scanning and shredding old, outdated paper files and generally tightening up our procedures.
I am also focusing on various types of “guerilla marketing” that have little or no out of pocket cost. Examples of guerilla marketing for me includes:
I have also finished a second book – this one about educational video marketing and I am revising my first book about Social Security disability
I am also looking at every recurring subscription I have – do I really need that $250 annual update to that treatise on Social Security disability law that I crack open maybe once a year?
I am also starting to think about how I might pivot if our economy ends up in a deep recession or even a depression. That is an article for another day but it involves taking stock of my skills (website design, photography, videography, Internet marketing) and thinking about how I can turn these skills into a cash generating business. But my efforts in this regard is currently limited to increasing my knowledge and skills.
My guess is that we will return to some level of normalcy within the next four to six months, if not sooner and I expect that my current endeavors – my law practice and my video marketing consultancy – will continue to be viable.
So, in conclusion, my advice to you is to cut overhead where you can, increase your knowledge and skill sets for revenue producing business and stay the course for the next few months. If you sense that our economic malaise is growing and worsening, then it would be time to carefully and with planning, start a transition into something new.
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