Do you educate your clients? As attorneys and paralegals, it’s easy for us to get into a rhythm of preparing complaints, answers, and discovery. This day-to-day rhythm may cause us to forget that some clients have never needed the services of an attorney before. For our first time clients, everything from the terminology we use, the documents we produce, to what we tell them is foreign and scary. To make matters worse many new clients are too embarrassed to tell us they don’t understand what we are doing or what we are talking about. In this post I will give you some tips on how you can educate your clients, and generate a social media following all rolled into one.
The easiest way to educate your clients on the legal process is to create polls and questions than post them on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus. Find out what your clients know, what they do not know, and what they want to know. Then use that information to educate your clients using video blogs, podcasts, and even free webinars.
When you create your video blogs, podcasts, and free webinars record them because you can reproduce these recordings. You might wonder how you can reproduce your recordings. Let’s pretend for a second you have made a video blog, which explains depositions or discovery. Shortly, thereafter one of your cases reaches the point you need to schedule depositions. Your client is nervous and has never been through a deposition before. What do you do? Do you educate your client with an expensive boring video created by a non-lawyer? No, you don’t. You have your client watch your video blog and meet with your paralegal.
Educating your clients need not be a chore or very expensive. If you write blogs, make a podcast, or even send written letters to your clients you can educate them.
In conclusion, the more you educate your clients the better they can help you represent their best interests. To ensure your firm is focused on educating your clients, ask yourself occasionally, “Are you educating your clients?” Write down your answer. If you find you do not invest time in the education of your clients, make a list of three things you can implement to educate them. Educating your clients should be one of your top priorities.
