Summer 2004

In This Issue

Profile: Ouida Fox: AALA's Savannah Connection Marketing, Sales, Business Development – What’s the Difference, and Who Does What? Law Firm Administrators Boost Readership, Win Award with e-Newsletter The Hype about Health Savings Accounts Spam and Filters: Improving the Deliverability of Your Firm's Email Communications Acquiring Foreign-Born Clients: Marketing Legal Services to a Growing Niche The TRUE Stella Awards - 2003 Winners

Profile: Ouida Fox - AALA's Savannah Connection
By: June D. Bell

There isn’t a legal administrator in Georgia who goes to the lengths that Ouida Fox does to meet with her colleagues. Each month, the Savannah resident boards a plane for the 40-minute flight into Atlanta for the Association of Legal Administrators’ luncheon and meeting. After the meal, the speaker and some much-anticipated networking, she heads to the airport for her flight back to Savannah.

Ouida says she gladly crosses the state to gather with other legal administrators because their camaraderie, advice and friendships enhance her career and her life. She’s the administrator for Savannah’s Hunter, Maclean, Exley & Dunn, a 57-lawyer firm that is the state’s largest outside of Atlanta.

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Marketing, Sales, Business Development – What’s the Difference, and Who Does What?
By: Nathan A. Darling, Marketing Manager, Kirkpatrick & Lockhart LLP, Washington, DC President-Elect, Legal Marketing Association, Mid-Atlantic Chapter

The marketing function in law firms has evolved rapidly and significantly in recent years. Presently, a majority if not all of the firms ranked in the American Lawyer 100 have marketing departments. Small and sole practitioner firms, too, are implementing marketing concepts to leverage attorney time spent on business development activities. Many firms are looking to corporate America or to the accounting and consulting professions for models of how to structure their marketing/business development functions. Long a taboo concept in law firms, the “S” word – sales – is taking hold as a specific function in a growing number of firms.

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Law Firm Administrators Boost Readership, Win Award with e-Newsletter
By: John Toth 

"If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got." Taking that bit of folk wisdom to heart, our Chapter -- the largest ALA Chapter in the South with nearly 230 members -- saw the opportunity early in 2003 to completely transform the way it prepared and used its member communication tools by moving to an all-electronic format for production and distribution of our quarterly chapter newsletter.

Read more more about the process behind that change in this article by John Toth originally published on the Law Marketing Portal.

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The Hype about Health Savings Accounts
By: Angus McRae, Jr., CEBS

The health insurance industry has long been cloaked in an impenetrable veneer of terminology and it is now time to add two new acronyms to our lexicon – HSA (Health Savings Account) and HDHP (High Deductible Health Plan). The Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, added Section 223 to the Internal Revenue Code to permit eligible individuals to establish HSAs for taxable years beginning after December 31, 2003.

You may think of an HSA as a 401(k) plan for healthcare – save money through pre-tax payroll deductions, earnings on the money are not includable in gross income, and distributions from an HSA used exclusively to pay for qualified medical expenses of the account beneficiary, his or her spouse, or dependents are excludable from gross income. Note, however, that unlike most 401(k) plans there is no vesting schedule to protect employer contributions.

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Spam and Filters: Improving the Deliverability of Your Firm's Email Communications
By: Joshua Fruchter, President, eLawMarketing

The increasing use of filters by ISP’s and corporations to block spam has had one downside for professional service firms engaged in legitimate email marketing – an increased risk that their emails will be improperly labeled as spam and either blocked entirely or routed to users’ junk (bulk mail) folders.

The possibility of emails getting hit with “false positives” has increased interest in deliverability - that is, solutions designed to maximize the delivery of email campaigns to intended recipients without getting blocked. The key to improving the deliverability of your firm's email communications lies in understanding the various types of filters employed by ISP’s and corporations, and then exploring the solutions available to address each one.

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Acquiring Foreign-Born Clients: Marketing Legal Services to a Growing Niche
By: Nina Ivanichvili, Language Alliance

There is an under-represented, largely untapped market in multilingual America. It is growing exponentially — and so is its purchasing power. In 2002, more than 11 percent of the total U.S. population, or 32.5 million people, were foreign born. Among them, 52 percent were born in Latin America, 26 percent in Asia, 14 percent in Europe, and the remaining 8 percent in other regions of the world, such as Africa and Oceania. The national buying power of Hispanics, pegged by the Selig Center for Economic Growth, was $653 billion in 2003, and is projected to exceed a trillion dollars in 2008. The buying power of Asian consumers was $344 billion in 2003, and is projected to reach $526 billion in 2008. Based on the above, many foreign-born Americans are likely to own their own businesses, obtain mortgages and buy homes, acquire college degrees, and generally create great marketing opportunities for law firms that pay attention to their needs.

This article suggests ways American law firms can establish key points of differentiation, or gain a competitive edge, in the minds of foreign-born clients. It discusses the need to develop cultural sensitivity and bias-free language skills, the way to become a foreign-language-friendly law practice, and the alternatives to advertising in the traditional mainstream media. Finally, the article provides practical tips for positioning the law firm as an “expert” in serving foreign-born clients.

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The TRUE Stella Awards - 2003 Winners
By: Randy Cassingham

The Stella Awards were inspired by Stella Liebeck. In 1992, Stella, then 79, spilled a cup of McDonald's coffee onto her lap, burning herself. A New Mexico jury awarded her $2.9 million in damages. Ever since, the name "Stella Award" has been applied to any wild, outrageous, or ridiculous lawsuits -- including bogus cases. This article highlights the 2003 winners.

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Editor: Debra F. Goldman (dgoldman@gmlj.com)

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