I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend (and speak) at the LMA 2018 Annual Conference, which is THE largest annual meeting of legal marketing and business professionals in the industry.

If your experience was anything like mine, you learned a lot, you made many new valuable connections, you reconnected with industry friends, and you spent a lot of time in the exhibit hall talking to leading service providers about their products and technologies. You likely saw Mario Lopez and quite a few wrestlers in town for Wrestlemania in the common spaces at the Hyatt Regency, and you returned to the office with a ton of information to digest and ideas to implement, which is exciting but also quite overwhelming.

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#LMA18 is almost here and I can’t wait! I look forward to this conference all year long. I’m excited to reunite with friends and to bring back new ideas to my firm. I’ve been thinking about how I can maximize my time away from the office (missing three full work days is stressful) and use the conference as an opportunity to not only learn and network, but also to build my professional brand.

So how do you get the most out of your conference experience and use it as an opportunity to build your own brand? I’ve put together some of my own tips and shared a few of my favorites from Nancy Myrland’s must-read post, “How To Maximize Your #LMA18 Annual Conference Experience.”

client centric 2

At the heart of this year’s Legal Marketing Association’s 2017 Southeast Conference was the importance of integrating the voice of the client in all marketing and business development efforts.

The message: firms that are successfully able to adopt the client-centric mindset and delight their clients will have a significant advantage over their competitors. 

It’s important to remember that the role of the client can be different things to different professionals. For example, if you are an in-house legal marketer, your clients are not only your traditional external clients, but also the lawyers at your firm, your colleagues in other administrative departments, your COO, etc. And if you are a business partner/service provider, anyone and everyone can potentially be a client or a referral source.

I was lucky enough to once again have the opportunity to speak at LMASE17 (more about that a bit later). A talented group of industry speakers provided attendees with actionable and innovative ideas under the conference’s theme of “mapping the future.” Here are some highlights: 

podcast

I recently had the opportunity to participate in a podcast with Good2bSocial where I discussed the unique challenges faced by small and mid-size law firms. I noted how they can take more risks on creative marketing strategies, but staffing and budget resources are more limited, which can lead to opportunities to utilize outside business partners in areas like writing, design or SEO. Big law can lead to legal marketers being stretched thin, whereas small law can allow marketers to dive deep into content marketing.

lmase

I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to speak at the 2016 LMA Southeastern Chapter Conference last week. It was my first time attending this conference, and it was well worth the trip to Orlando as it was the perfect size to facilitate networking, collaboration and learning.

A talented group of industry speakers provided attendees with actionable and innovative ideas to inspire under the conference’s theme of “grow, innovate and succeed.” Some highlights included: