Lawyer podcasts : Marketing success for LexBlog customer

LexBlog customer, Stark and Stark, a 100 lawyer New Jersey firm, is having success in obtaining new business by virtue of podcasts. So much so, their success was reported on in NorthJersey.com.

Alone in a conference room, Tom Onder spoke into a tiny recording device.

Fiddling with the digital controls, the Princeton bankruptcy lawyer re-recorded when he stumbled over a phrase.

Later that day, his 10-minute talk on commercial landlords and tenant bankruptcy became Podcast No. 12.

Onder’s firm, Stark & Stark, is one of a small but growing number of businesses around the nation using podcasts as a way to drum up business……

Stark & Stark began podcasting in July, making the new recordings available via the law firm’s Web site on a weekly basis, said Rich DeLuca, the firm’s business development guru. So far, the podcasts have been downloaded about 3,000 times, he said.

‘It’s really unbelievable,’ said DeLuca, although he added he has no way of knowing if people downloading the podcasts are also then listening to the firm’s legal eagles……

DeLuca, the Stark & Stark law firm’s podcasting expert, thinks podcasting by business will be big, but there are potential pitfalls, especially if businesses try to make their podcast strictly a marketing tool without adding some real value for the listener.

Onder is sold on the concept.

Recording them is much like using a Dictaphone, a device he’s familiar with. And he predicts other law firms may start to use podcasts, along with blogs.

Last week, Onder spoke to a fellow lawyer at another firm who tried to reach prospective clients in a more traditional way by writing an article for a trade journal. It took about two months before he received any response to the article from a prospective client.

Two days after Onder’s Podcast #12 went live, he got a call from someone who listened and called him for advice. That caller isn’t a client yet, but Onder said he might become one soon.

‘I think a lot of firms may try this,’ he said, ‘This is such a great technology.

Congrats to Stark & Stark on their marketing successes. It was only a year ago that Rich DeLuca contacted LexBlog about the possibility of using blogs to market the firm’s lawyers. Wasn’t much later that Rich was handing a digital recorder to lawyers so they could record seminars and now podcasts.

What made it really great was that getting these recordings up on the net was a snap. Rich had the original idea. LexBlog taught him how to ftp (file transfer protocol) a condensed file to the server on which we host the firm’s blogs and Stark & Stark was up and rolling.

Good law firm Internet marketing solutions are all about empowering the firm to use the latest technology to help themselves. Technology can be easy to use – fun and profitable as well.