Do you market yourself proudly, reluctantly or not at all?
We’re admittedly a few weeks late to this particular discussion, but couldn’t resist pulling our readers in, especially as we call special attention to legal bloggers this month with our Blawg 100 feature.
“In the past week or so, the great debate in the legal profession—legal marketing—has reared its head, again. And it has brought out the zealots on both sides. Within the profession, legal marketing is a hot-button issue like abortion, gay rights and stem cell research,” blogger Susan Cartier Liebel wrote at Build a Solo Practice (click here for the rest of her post), seemingly in response to posts by Scott Greenfield at Simple Justice about lawyers marketing themselves on via legal blogs and / or devoting blogs to the topic of legal marketing.
“The problem is that this obsession with marketing makes the legal profession, if you’re not laughing when I use the word profession, look pathetic,” Greenfield wrote. Click here for the rest of that post. In a subsequent post, he wrote, “I believe that the legal marketing trend is one of the most destructive forces to the legal profession there is, and I am against it. … Lawyers do not need to demean themselves to make a living. They need to know how to be great lawyers.”
Liebel again: “To say in any way shape or form that lawyers, new or old, should not market, shows a lack of understanding about what marketing is. It is my experience that those who claim lawyers ‘shouldn’t market … it’s not dignified’ are not really talking about marketing at all. We all market in everything we do, intentionally or not.”
This prompts us to ask you: What do you do, if anything, to promote yourself as a lawyer? And what would you never do in the name of self-promotion?
Answer in the comments below.
Read last week’s question and answers about your reading list.
Our favorite answer from last week:
Posted by Alabama: “I like to read the obituaries every morning to see who accomplished something with their life versus those who billed 2250 hours and had no life.”
