Tired of hiding in plain sight? Optimize your website and you won't be.

"Optimizing Your Online Shingle: On-Page and Off-Page Best Practices" by Robert Ambrogi and Steve Matthews in the ABA's Law Practice Magazine. Google's announcement that three-week-old Google+ has already reached 10,000,000 users serves as a powerful reminder of the increasingly fragmented landscape for marketing a legal practice online. But an active online presence is useless if you don't have a website that describes what you do, one that communicates how you help your clients and articulates your value. Because social networking is only part of the picture: sometimes (and perhaps most of the time), clients and potential clients find you not when they're chatting with friends on Twitter, but when they're looking for a lawyer that does what you do. So before you populate your Google+ feed, before you build your firm's Facebook page, before you create your YouTube channel, you need to optimize your website. Because if the search engines don't know about it, a tree falling in the forest can make all the sound it wants and still not be heard. Don't be that tree. Read today's post.

Succession planning in your law firm. Crystal ball need not apply.

Tom Grella's "Five Questions to Ask About Your Firm’s Succession Readiness" in the May / June 2011 edition of the ABA's Law Practice Magazine. Is your firm ready for the future? Not the "practicing in the cloud" future or the paperless office future or the Watson advising clients future. The future as in the next generation of leadership, when the current managing partner and practice leaders and office heads have retired, taking the recipe for success with them, leaving new leaders the challenge of practicing law and managing a firm and figuring out how to create value for the partnership. Think you're ready for that future? Shouldn't you be sure before it arrives? Grella's article, along with every other piece in this issue of Law Practice Magazine, is a big step in the right direction.

Managing a network isn't all fun and games.

Sally Schmidt's "Creating a Game Plan for Your Contacts" in the ABA's May / June 2011 Law Practice Magazine. Don't let the title fool you. Managing a network of clients, referral sources and other influencers isn't a game, it's work. A lot of work. Serious work. Valuable work. Schmidt knows that, and has laid out a practical and comprehensive plan for making sure you don't miss out on opportunities because you aren't following up with the right people. Six steps that will help you go from a stack of business cards to an executed plan of action. Read it, and get to work.