Having a rival pick off a group of partners is never a welcome occurrence, but how a law firm handles such an event can help mitigate further damage. Skillful communication about such departures – both internal and external – is crucial.

Watching colleagues depart en masse can be an alarming experience, and can spur  lawyers who remain to reassess their own status within the organization. According to a Law360 article, firm leaders need to act immediately: assemble the remaining partners, lead an honest discussion about what difficulties might lie ahead, and be attuned to attorneys’ concerns.

Honesty and openness doesn’t necessarily mean focusing on the negative aspects.

Legal consultants offer the following components of an open and effective communications strategy following a law firm raid:

1. Stop the Bleeding: Conduct damage control, but be aware that the audience might be composed of both partners who are eyeing their own departures and partners who are inclined to stay.
2. Get the Story Straight: Whether departures reflect deeper problems, it’s important that leaders present a clear picture of what’s going on and what it means for the firm. Experts warn against efforts to downplay the impact of departures, as this likely would be met with skepticism.
3. Don’t Just Talk, Listen: Leaders should hold discussions to determine what factors are the source of discontent. Mary K. Young, a strategist at the Zeughauser Group, emphasizes that listening to the concerns of others is key to “creating more glue” to keep a firm intact.
4. Be Honest, But Be Positive: Honesty and openness doesn’t necessarily mean focusing on the negative aspects – leaders should also recognize that “mobility is part of the game,” according to the Law360 article.
5. Take Stock: Once the departures have taken place, leaders should reassess the firm’s future – and perhaps realize the former attorneys ultimately may not have been a good fit.
6. Recruit: Actively recruit new talent – but make sure the timing is right and not too soon after the departures.

As we’ve detailed previously, we find ourselves in an era of high-profile firm mergers and high-stakes lateral acquisitions. Executing a sound communications strategy is critical to finding and keeping lateral talent. For firms facing the aftermath of attorney departures, skillful and strategic communication is just as important.

Law firms and law schools have been having some difficult conversations lately: breakup conversations. As the legal job market continues to shrink, law firms and law schools have been faced with tough decisions about separating with attorneys and professors, respectively. However necessary they might be, breakups are difficult, uncomfortable, and stressful for all parties involved. Harsh words are often spoken, and once they are it’s almost impossible to take them back.  Go about them the wrong way and you could end up damaging your own reputation (as Albany Law School has had to learn the hard way).

Departures, like breakups, are really all about messaging. Institutions never want to appear to be vindictive or bitter towards departing employees. From a PR standpoint, it’s important to remember that those on the outside—who haven’t seen the messy details of the relationship up close—are naturally more likely to sympathize with an individual who has just lost her livelihood than a faceless entity.

There’s something about being negative towards colleagues that turns people off.

In order to avoid significant public embarrassment or a Fatal Attraction-type situation, institutions should follow these “departure etiquette” tips and maybe, just maybe, both parties can move on unscathed:

1) Be Short & Direct. Employers need to be brief, upfront, and direct.  Letting people go is unpleasant, and it’s best not to drag it out.

2) Be Honest. Recently, Albany Law School came under major fire when it attributed its layoff of tenured professors on the school’s troubled financial situation, only to have the dismissed profs bring in an independent account to counter that the school was “in very strong financial condition.” Institutions need to be open and honest about their reasons for letting employees go, in order to avoid increased controversy.

3) Listen. Employees who are blindsided with dismissals are undoubtedly going to have some strong feelings about the situation, and while it might be awkward, they should be given the chance to speak their minds directly to decision makers.

4) Avoid Trash Talk. In order to maintain an appropriate level of professionalism throughout the departure process, it’s best that institutional leaders avoid any kind of personal attacks on dismissed employees, internally or externally.

5) Buy Some Good Will (sometimes literally). There’s something about being negative towards colleagues that turns people off. It’s the reason why job applicants instinctively know (or should instinctively know) not to speak ill of their former employers. The same principle applies to employers who ask for comment about former employees. Short of putting their own reputations on the line (by, for instance, giving glowing recommendation letters to those they know to be bad employees), they should be as positive about their former employees as possible. It makes both parties look better, and at very little cost buys a measure of goodwill from former employees who don’t need any encouragement to become bitter. External praise is a small but important complement to whatever monetary compensation (through severance or other measures) the firm or school can afford. Nothing is easy when it comes to breakups, but sometimes a healthy amount of goodwill can avoid much more expensive—and embarrassing—public feuds.

Mark Herrmann, a columnist on in-house issues at Above the Law, had a nice post this week. In it, he promised to deliver “the key to good writing.” That’s a pretty big promise, but I think Herrmann is onto something here.

The key to good writing, he said, is this: “Don’t think about what you want to say. Think about what the other guy needs to hear.”

That is terrifically good advice. In his post, Herrmann gives several examples in which he applies his advice to the “macro” decision of selecting a topic for a given piece of writing. Take the example of choosing topics for blog posts:

Don’t think about what you want to say. Think about what the other guy needs to hear.

“What should today’s blog post (or the new issue of the firm newsletter) say?

1. Option one (seemingly used by most lawyers): ‘Truk acident (sic) on I-95! Hire me!’
2. Option two (seemingly used by most lawyers at elite firms): ‘Last month, our state’s Supreme Court handed down a new opinion.  In this article, we describe the facts of the case in painful detail, regurgitate the court’s reasoning, and conclude that the Supreme Court recently decided a case.’
3. Option three: ‘Yesterday, our state’s Supreme Court handed down an opinion that gives employers a new defense against wage-and-hour class actions.  Employers should immediately take three steps to make maximum use of this new change in the law…'”

Option three is obviously the best. (It’s also the hardest, as Herrmann admits—but good writing is not easy writing, and option three delivers the most value to readers.)

Herrmann has indeed put his finger on something. But I would like to take it a step further.

Herrmann’s call to “think about what the other guy needs to hear” works not only at the “macro” level of topic selection, but on the “micro” level of choosing words, constructing sentences, and linking paragraphs. It takes considerable effort to do that, and many writers, mentally drained from the process, are content to simply get something on the page and move on. Excellent writers separate themselves by taking the extra step to consider what they’ve written, and then make it easy to read. They think, in Herrmann’s words, about what the other guy needs to hear.

Often, this results in shorter sentences, plainer language, and better clarity of thought. This lovely scene from A River Runs Through It says it all:

Thinking about “what the other guy needs to hear” when putting words to paper isn’t just good advice for schoolboys. It’s advice that lawyers, in particular, need to consider, given their professional bias for opaque prose. When someone says that you “sound like a lawyer,” they usually mean that you just tried to sound smart by using inflated language, but didn’t make any sense. Unfortunately, that is how lawyers sometimes write.

A truly gifted writer, the late David Foster Wallace (whose final book dealt with the IRS), explained in an interview why this is so (emphasis added):

“…in many tight, insular communities—where membership is partly based on intelligence, proficiency and being able to speak the language of the discipline—pieces of writing become as much or more about presenting one’s own qualifications for inclusion in the group than transmission of meaning. And that’s how in disciplines like academia—or, I’ve read some really good legal prose, but when it’s really, really horrible (IRS Code stuff)—I think that very often it stems from insecurity and that people feel that unless they can mimic the particular jargon and style of their peers, they won’t be taken seriously and their ideas won’t be taken seriously.”

Many lawyers, myself included, will recognize the truth of this statement.  But the key to writing a good blog post, or a good article, or a good speech, is not “sounding like a lawyer.” The key is making that blog post, article, or speech easy for the audience to digest.

Lawyers who accomplish that feat will be very well respected indeed. And they won’t ever need another writing tip again.

If you follow this kind of stuff, you know that in April, Google tweaked its search algorithm to reward mobile-friendly websites. Those that are mobile-friendly (that is, they display well on your iPhone and other mobile devices) got a bump in search rankings, appearing closer to the top of the page for relevant searches. This has the effect, of course, of punishing sites that are not mobile friendly.

There’s been a whole lot of consternation about this change, the effects of which have reportedly been quite substantial, but the question for professional service firms remains: do we really need to care about this?

But the question for professional service firms remains: do we really need to care about this?

t’s a good question to ask. For any number of reasons, obsessing over SEO is not something we recommend for sophisticated law firms or other service providers. First, clients are not hiring such firms because they happen across them in a search for “bet-the-company litigator.” Second, even Google’s algorithm recognizes that that in the end, putting out high-quality content is far more important—and impactful on search rankings—than trying to game the system with keywords or other trickery.

While we often encourage clients to ignore all the noise about Google’s algorithm and simply focus on the content of their site, we see good reason for firms to invest the resources necessary to make their websites mobile-friendly.

• First, the audience that law firms are targeting likes to read on the go. More than half of all in-house counsel read to stay informed on mobile devices. And they won’t be reading your blog at the airport if it isn’t mobile-friendly. That’s a problem for the 73% of legal blogs that, according to a recent LexBlog survey, have not been designed for easy viewing on phones and tablets. While none of this has anything to do with Google’s recent change, it is a big reason for firms to go mobile-friendly with their sites.
• Second, although it’s true that client prospects aren’t going to find attorneys directly via Google searches, it’s also true that they are likely to search on topics of interest to them.

As Kevin O’Keefe noted in an Above the Law post on the topic: “[I]f a lawyer writes a post on OPEC’s decision to maintain oil production and its impact on M&A activities, the lawyer expects the post to be found on a search by an exec or in-house counsel on an iPhone. It’s the same for small law firms writing on unique issues. They want to get seen by consumers and small business keying in a question, as sophisticated clients are apt to do.”

With Google’s recent changes, those searches are less likely to lead to the client discovering the attorney author (and being impressed with her knowledge on the relevant subject, making a connection on LinkedIn, and on and on) if the site is not mobile-optimized.

For these two reasons, we strongly recommend that firms make their websites ready to take on the go.

Picture this: you’re applying for a job. You do everything right—you submit the perfect application, ace the interview, and even score bonus points by sending a thank you note. Yet, inexplicably, you don’t get offered the job. So what was missing?

Surprisingly enough, the answer could be your Facebook account—or lack thereof.

In light of Facebook’s extreme popularity, some HR managers view those who don’t have a Facebook profile as “suspicious.”

A report from London’s Daily Mail posits that those without Facebook accounts are less likely to be hired in a professional setting. In light of Facebook’s extreme popularity, some HR managers view those who don’t have a Facebook profile as “suspicious,” and believe it can indicate abnormality or dysfunction.

A recent post from PR Daily’s Michael Sebastian picked up on the findings, and while some are a little extreme, they provide serious food for thought for professional service providers. Their prospective clients, after all, often turn to networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn to dig up some preliminary information about the professionals they are considering hiring. A nonexistent social media presence will seriously hurt those professionals for the same reason it affects young people without a Facebook account: it looks weird. For professionals today, having an established presence on the web is necessary to being viewed as a competent professional service provider. And those without some searchable Internet presence beyond their firm profiles seriously harm their changes of being hired at all.

So even if you’re not the most tech-savvy person in the world, it might be time to jump on the social media bandwagon and create that LinkedIn account. You’ll be putting yourself in the running for your next big engagement.

A recent article by New York Times’s Nick Bilton asks: is Twitter a technology company or a media company? Until recently, the answer was easy—Twitter is a technology company, full stop. Twitter creates the technology platform, but its users are the ones who produce the content (i.e., the media) distributed over it. To analogize, Twitter is like the television manufacturer, while its users are like NBC, ABC, and Comedy Central. No one thinks of Panasonic as a media company, and they shouldn’t have thought of Twitter that way either…but that might be changing.

It’s worth considering how powerful Twitter could become acting as, in essence, a publisher of content.

Twitter dipped its toe into the content realm recently when it created its own page dedicated to NASCAR, curating tweets relevant to Ricky Bobby, et al. and placing them in their own dedicated location. And now it is doing the same with the Olympics.

The experiment has had its hiccups, but it’s worth considering how powerful Twitter could become acting as, in essence, a publisher of content. It’s a trend that could become relevant to professional service providers. JD Supra and others do a great job curating legal content, but it’s interesting to think about what a Twitter page on white-collar crime or law schools or any other legal topic might look like, and what it could do for marketers in those fields. What legal-oriented subject area would you like to see Twitter tackle first? Or would you prefer it to remain exclusively a technology company, and leave the content to the rest of us?