Los Angeles Trust and Probate Litigation Attorney, SirkinLaw

Some attorneys have greater business risks

What happens to legal files if an attorney become incapacitated or dies? What can you do to ready your solo law practice for sale? What could happen to the attorney-client trust funds? Who would take possession of the clients' files? What happens to the attorney-client privilege? Who will sell the practice? Who is allowed to look at a client's file? For sole practitioners, these questions pose significant risks as well as great planning opportunities, as long as planning is done before incapacity.

Fortunately, California enacted laws which allow solo attorneys to plan for their businesses in the event of incapacity and death. Mina N. Sirkin, a Family Wealth Lawyer in Los Angeles, California has created PracticeAssure(TM), a business system which guides attorneys to plan for 1) retiring; 2) selling a practice; and 3) succession in specific areas of their law practice and business while they are healthy. Practice administration is a very challenging area, but it is usually the attorney who knows who would be best suited to administer the practice.

Many times the surviving spouse gets overwhelmed with the great task of returning client files, selling the practice, and managing the other parts of the estate. This task can be reduced to some basic steps to preserve the value of the practice. Lack of planning greatly reduces the value of a practice upon sale.

PracticeAssure(TM) engages solo attorneys to take the necessary steps in protecting their clients' files and money, protecting the value of the law practice, making the practice a marketable practice, and protecting the attorney's estate by implementing simple steps in succession planning over a one year period.

Ms. Sirkin will be speaking at an introductory seminar regarding the above risks and how attorneys can minimize them:

Seminar Date: April 17, 2007 Time: 12:00 p.m.-12:30 p.m. Pacific

Place: Internet. This is a virtual seminar. If you are unable to attend at the date or time above, please email us with a request for virtual files at Info @ SirkinLaw.com .

Price: $150.00

To Register for the introductory seminar and for more information about the PracticeAssure(TM), email [email protected].

Mina N. Sirkin is a Board Certified Specialist Attorney in Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law by the Board of Legal Specialization of the State Bar of California. Ms. Sirkin practices in Los Angeles County, California. She was the legal expert to PrimeTime News, CBS 2 / KCAL 9 on the death of Anna Nicole Smith. [email protected]. http://www.SirkinLaw.com. Tel: 818-340-4479

What law schools don't teach you about the science of marketing

Law firm marketing is a science.  Law school was not intended to teach you how to practice law and certainly was not meant to teach you about marketing.   You can easily create a marketable law practice using the "Law Firm Marketing Science Systems (TM)."   If you are looking to ethically grow your book of business, and want clients who will refer to you again and again, join us for this audio seminar.   We will cover the introduction to the Science of Law Firm Marketing:

1. Learn how to identify your highest pay-off activities.

2. Learn how to identify your highest time-consuming activities.

3. Learn to build law office virtual team members for your highest pay-off activities.

4. Blog marketing: Find out what works and how to leverage your blog to create new business.

5. Create law firm products which will create passive income long after you retire.

6. Using articles to promote your legal services.

7.  How to use simple public relations tactics to promote your legal services.

8.  How to send two monthly follow-up emails to clients to promote your new legal services and to keep clients happy.

9.   How Social Marketing differs from Social Networking; What methods work in a law office setting.

10.  How to build a marketable, and scalable business model for your law firm.

11.  Developing an effective "Thank you" method for to your clients after case completion.

Email to inquire and to register:  [email protected] (att:  Anthony)

Date: March 18, 2008. Time: 12:00 p.m.-12:20 PST

Cost:  $150.00

Place:  Internet; This is a virtual seminar.   If you are unable to attend at the above time, you may request the virtual location MP3 file and the Pdf course material when you register.

Speaker:

Mina N. Sirkin is a Board Certified Specialist attorney in Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law, by the Board of Legal Specialization of the State Bar of California.  She was the legal expert to Prime Time News, CBS / K-CAL9 on the death of Anna Nicole Smith.  Ms. Sirkin practices in Los Angeles County, California.  [email protected].  http://www.SirkinLaw.com.

This seminar is a production of Peter Port Publications, Inc.

What about competition?

Many small firm trust and estate practitioners have told me that they are concerned about competition.  I wanted to remind those small firm practitioners that the legal economy is so large that most attorneys don't ever have to worry about competition.   Here are some statistics according to the U.S. Census Bureau to ease your minds:  1) U.S. Population 300M.  2) Over one-half of the population qualifies as a buyer of legal services as an individual. 3)  14.5M Americans are 65 and older as of year 2000. 4) 97.5M Americans are single or unmarried. 5) 54% of the unmarried group are women. 6) 63% of the 97.5M have never been married. 7) 23% of the 97.5M are divorced. 8) 14% of the 97.5 M Americans are widowed.

If you practice in Los Angeles County, California, this County's population is approximately 10 Million.  Here is the rest of the stats for LA County:

Demographic Estimates - show more >>	Estimate	Percent	U.S.	Margin of Error
Total population	9,948,081			*****
Male	4,927,030	49.5	49.2%	+/-767
Female	5,021,051	50.5	50.8%	+/-767
Median age (years)	33.9	(X)	36.4	+/-0.2
Under 5 years	741,942	7.5	6.8%	*****
18 years and over	7,267,873	73.1	75.4%	*****
65 years and over	1,013,339	10.2	12.4%	+/-529
One race	9,658,799	97.1	98.0%	+/-15,254
White	4,660,343	46.8	73.9%	+/-36,035
Black or African American	883,699	8.9	12.4%	+/-6,733
American Indian and Alaska Native	49,164	0.5	0.8%	+/-4,576
Asian	1,288,643	13.0	4.4%	+/-6,418
Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander	27,701	0.3	0.1%	+/-2,849
Some other race	2,749,249	27.6	6.3%	+/-36,154
Two or more races	289,282	2.9	2.0%	+/-15,254
Hispanic or Latino (of any race)	4,706,994	47.3	14.8%	*****

My estimate for the number of trusts and estates practitioners in Los Angeles County is approximately: 1000.  If you are worried about competition, and ignored the population younger than 65, and only focused on the population over 65, just divide 1M by 1000. Need I say more?

Mina N. Sirkin, Esq. is a California Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law by the Board of Legal Specialization of the State Bar of California who practices in Los Angeles County, California.  [email protected].  http://www.SirkinLaw.com.

Top Three Marketing Strategies For Estate Planners

Larry Bodine, marketer extraordinaire, to large law firms asked me to address the following questions on my blog: 

Larry, Thank you for your email expressing interest in the following:

1.  If an estate planning lawyer is looking for wealthy individuals, what is the best way to find them?
2.  If an estate planning lawyer is looking for business clients who need estate planning work, what is the best way to find them?

If an estate planning attorney is looking for wealthy clients, he or she must connect to other attorneys who have wealthy or high net worth clients who don't do estate planning.   Good matches for estate planning attorneys are family lawyers, business lawyers and best of all, real estate litigation lawyers.   A lawyer looking for business clients who may have estate planning needs has to be connected to CPAs and Brokers.  A high net worth person who has just completed a high-end real estate sale or business sale is a very good prospect for estate planning.   Those who know about those business deals are business brokers, real estate brokers and CPAs.

Marketing for Certified Specialists and niche attorneys is in some ways simpler than marketing a general practice.  All attorneys, but especially Certified Specialists can generally take advantage of the three top basis methods of marketing.  1)  Contact with other Practitioners or general practitioners through email or other media and keep your name in front of them; 2)  Give seminars for other Attorneys and other professionals and introduce them to what you do and share the recent case law with them;  3) Community involvement.   If you are not a "people person" and don't particularly enjoy marketing in the above three ways, you may want to try internet marketing in sites most visited by wealthy individuals.

Because as a Certified Specialist, an attorney has already established a niche, the key is to identify where most of the existing clients are coming from.  If most of your clients are coming from family lawyers, you should develop a newsletter or monthly article which gets your name in front of your local family lawyers.  If your top producing clients are coming from CPAs, for example, your printed newsletter or electronic newsletter should be in front of that group every month.

To learn more about business development, see Miraval Business Development Retreat: http://www.blog.larrybodine.com.

Public Relations

If you have ever wondered where to go for PR marketing, here is a link of a wonderful site where you can subscribe to PR leads: prleads.com.  Dan Janal teaches you how to use PR leads to market your firm.  He also has a blog which has a wealth of information on how to deal with the press.  www.prleads.com/blog.

To ask or not to ask for referrals

There is a new school of thought on referrals.    While in the old days lawyers were told to ask for referrals, some law firms are changing the rules.    The idea behind not asking for referrals connects to the psychology of the referring party.  The new idea is as follows:

We make referrals when only these three

conditions are met:

1. I believe the person I'm referring

wants what the company can do.

2. I believe the company can and will

do what that person wants.

3. I want to help them both.

If any of the above are missing, the referral is not made.   Law firms then would do better in finding out WHAT their customers want and delivering the service so that the customer is proud to have his or her colleage benefit from the same service.

Mina N. Sirkin, Esq. is a California Certified Specialist in Estate Planning, Probate and Trust Law by the Board of Legal Specialization of the State Bar of California who practices in Los Angeles County, California.  [email protected].  http://www.SirkinLaw.com.

Discovering Your Niche

Niche marketing is a multi-variable process.   The first variable is identifying the desired niche.   Second is identifying the characteristics of the buyers of legal service in that niche.   For example, if you choose to deliver services in the special education area, you will have to identify who your buyers are.   Buyers of special education parents are A) Parents, B) Are dissatisfied with the school services given by the districts.   You then have to identify which districts in your service area produce the most dissatisfied buyers.  In mine, its the Los Angeles Unified School District.   Connecting to parents of special education children requires joining groups of parents, and then groups of parents who are collecting information about special education, followed by the geographical location.   Yahoo Groups has a large following of special education parents.   Try similar ideas in your areas of practice.

Put marketing as a task on your calendar

On a weekly basis, complete this list by putting one person's name in front of each item, and translate it to time on your calendar:

1. Send a newspaper clipping or email to a contact in your network:
2. Visit a client at their business to learn more about them:
3. Take a business contact to lunch, coffee, golf or an event.
4. Take a specific action to participate in an organization.
5. Write and article.
6. Arrange for a speaking venue.

If you made one contact per week, that is meeting 50 new people per year, who can send you an average of two clients per year.   Not bad for just putting it on your calendar.

Finding a Niche

Are you a member of any listserve?  If you are not, you may not be adequately using this tool to market yourself.   Everyone is a member of a Niche.  Use your ethnicity, religion, club memberships to find your niche.  Then build your list and market to them.

Drafting More Profitable Fee Agreements

Drafting profitable fee agreements is an art.   The nature of your client's expectation from the outset governs the amount of profit you will make on each case.   If the language of the fee agreement is in compliance with your client's expectation, it sets the theme for the balance of the relationship.