Have you read these?

A smattering of valuable and relevant posts from the blawgosphere and beyond

• “50 Tips to Help You Win Client Competitions” from Ann Lee Gibson. Good ideas never lose relevance: the advice in this article is as valuable today as it was in 2001. Lawyers and legal marketers, this is a must read. The bonus? You don’t have to implement all 50 to see results. Making just a handful of changes suggested by Gibson is enough for you to improve the pitch process, the first step on the road to winning more work.
  
  
• “Key Account Management” from David Maister. When you read this article, you’ll think it was written in response to the challenges facing lawyers in today’s dismal climate. Think again. It’s hard not to wonder what the profession would look like today if more firms had adopted in 1997 the program outlined by Maister in this piece. There’s really no excuse for not heeding these lessons today, is there? 
  
  
• “10 Tips to Build Trust with Social Media” from Sometimes it’s better to be socially creative. A lot has been written about optimizing your Web 2.0 presence to gain readers / followers / traffic / hits / etc. But it’s not just about ears and eyeballs, is it? Isn’t developing clients a function of building trust? Your Web 2.0 activities aren’t any different from your other trust-building activities, and this post will help you frame the discussion in those same terms.   
  
  
• "A merger followed by a decimation of the acquired company’s law department” from Rees Morrison’s Law Department Management blog. If you don’t have this blog on your RSS feed, add it right now. Why? Because Morrison writes for in-house legal departments, and outside firms can gain a tremendous amount of insight from what he says. This post is a good example. Read it as a reminder that even if you do everything right and make your clients happy and provide them with value that goes beyond all expectations, you can't control everything. Plan for it. 
  
  
• “Tips for Delegating Marketing on the Cheap” from Nolo’s Legal Marketing Blawg. Written with sole practitioners in mind, this post provides extremely practical advice on how lawyers can maximize the value of their marketing time. Don’t let the context fool you, though. Even if you’re not on your own – even if you have marketing staff – this post will very likely help you better manage the time you spend marketing your practice.