Observed

Let’s say you’re dealing with a sentence where your reader can’t deduce someone’s gender, and you want a pronoun:

“An attorney in our Shively office recently argued a case before the Supreme Court of the United States.  He and his client — a manufacturer appealing a case involving commercial free speech — prevailed.”

This example used  the traditional default pronoun for indeterminate gender nouns.  When I was first taught grammar, students were instructed to go with male variations for pronoun forms — he, his, him.

Nowadays, however, we strive to rid our writing of such gender preferences.  Some guides suggest we resort to awkward and wordy constructions such as he/she and the like.  Or, we’re advised to eschew pronouns altogether, repeating proper and common nouns.

There’s another, far more elegant solution when you want a gender-neutral pronoun for…

• A person of unknown gender
• A generic type or class, or
• Where a person defies gender labels, such as Placebo’s Brian Molko

Use they and its inflected forms (i.e., their, them and the like) instead.

The singular they is perfectly acceptable, according to modern usage guides.  Some will defend it, explaining that it has been around for centuries in English, including formal writing.

I’ll add that they also sounds a lot better to the ear.

Creating humankind may be one of the Divine Spirit's greatest acts of faith. It's comparable (in a small, small way) to the hope you and I demonstrate when we risk rejection, uncertainty and everything else that comes with sales and business development.

Cathe Dykstra recently began an excellent essay about the organization she directs with an analogy.  She wrote in Louisville’s Courier-Journal that the things that make the rooftop garden at Family Scholar House grow and prosper can be likened to the things that the single, working, college-going participants at Family Scholar House need to grow and prosper.

I’ll extend Cathe’s wonderful analogy.  In addition to support and guidance and patience and so on, many things we do also take hope.

Or, perhaps, faith.  As in, leap of faith.  As in, be prepared, minimize your risk and then…jump.

I realized that what Cathe wrote about is also true of sales, fund raising and business development — and of many, many other things many of us do every day.  Such as having a child, matriculating to law school or making a cold sales call.

So, while I hope my readers get this far in this post (148 words), I know (from plenty of user-habit studies) that a lot of you won’t.

Nevertheless…

1. I write and post anyway, confident that if I don’t (or rarely) post anything, I predictably reduce my chances of Getting Found.
2. I make what I write as engaging as possible.  Such as leading with an interesting bit about Cathe’s rooftop garden and how it’s like the worker-scholars she plants and tends to.
3. I leverage the visual and ensure that I bake my main message into the caption under my post’s main image.

Get it?  I hope so.

Of course it's important to take bar rules on client communications seriously. However, there are plenty of effective ways to offer evidence that you're thinking about your prospects' needs without risking your license.

When I think about the three main reasons why clients and prospects visit your law firm’s Web site, I imagine that I also hear, “Yeah, but” in response.

As in, “Yeah, I realize studies say that clients want assurance that I can fix their problems and that I can make their lives easier (and that they’ll like working with me), but I have a professional code of ethical conduct.  I could be reprimanded or endanger my license if I make claims like that.”

My advice?  Don’t.

• First, back up.   Your state’s code of conduct probably isn’t a priority for most clients and prospects.  So, remember that they’re far more worried about their needs, not yours.

• Second, how you address Can you fix my problem? and Will you make my life easier? is more nuanced than a simple yes or no.

For example, a strategically-written case study can speak volumes about your abilities without ever promising a result.  Same with testimonials, rankings and other third-party endorsements.

Your bio is not merely a resume.  It’s the principal destination for most of your site’s visitors, one that offers you an opportunity to tell your story…in terms that matter to your visitors’ stated needs.

The ancient Romans (and many other cultures) understood the importance of perspective to beginnings and transitions. That's one of the reasons they created Janus, the (sometimes mixed gender) diety with two faces, one looking to the past and the other to the future.

What clients want from their professional service providers is pretty well established.  According to many experts, when prospects visit your law firm or architectural practice’s Web site or pick up your brochure, they probably have three questions in mind:

1. Can you fix my problem?
2. Will you make my life easier?
3. Will I like working with you?

Despite abundant evidence of this buyer’s perspective, a lot (no, most) of the marketing content I see (especially from law firms) puts the focus on the provider’s or the firm’s credentials instead of on the client’s needs.

Kon Leong, on the other hand, gets it.  He’s the co-founder, president and chief executive of ZL Technologies, an e-mail and file archiving company based in San Jose, Calif.  Here’s how he described his approach in a recent New York Times “Corner Office” interview:

One of my early jobs was selling computer hardware. What I learned about selling was probably more valuable than my M.B.A. I had seen selling as a process just about logic. Then I realized that has nothing to do with it.

You have to present your story in their context, not yours. They don’t really care if you’re standing on top of a robot and quoting equations. If they’re in the deep part of the forest, you’ve got to talk the language of the deep forest.

So, demonstrate (through case studies and the like) that you’ve solved your clients’ problems.  Demonstrate — don’t merely assert — that you care about client satisfaction by interviewing and surveying your clients…and then publishing the results.  And tell your readers what you’re like and what you do in your spare time, instead of treating this kind of Web content as something beneath you.

It’s simple.  Be practical and responsive.

At least, according to a panel of managing partners convened earlier this month in Boston.  The occasion was the annual conference organized by the New England chapter of the Legal Marketing Association.

Why practical and responsive? The reason they offered was just as simple:  It’s what clients’ customers expect from them.

It occurred to me that this is an extension of the wisdom imparted by Laura Meherg — namely, that clients tend to want lawyers who can:

1. Fix their problems.
2. Make their lives easier.
3. And, are nice to work with.

The challenge is how to best convey practical and responsive to your clients and prospects, short of demonstrating it.  In other words, how can your marketing content reflect these abstractions.

Consider case studies.  Here are a couple of real-world examples:

• A major engineering company brought John into a case after being hit with a variety of commercial and IP claims by an oil and gas equipment company in Texas.  “My strategy was to aggressively develop evidence before I even asked for documents.  So, I examined a key executive who had all of the information and was driving the dispute…before my opponent’s defenses were in place.”  As a result, John got damaging admissions into the record early, changing the risk calculus for both sides and setting up a favorable settlement.
• When a competitor sued a global manufacturing company with a patent infringement claim, John suspected that there was another, more deadly scenario in store for his client.  “My sense was that my opponent was leveraging the patent infringement claim in an attempt to get information to support a trade secret claim and get an injunction against my client.  If successful, this could effectively shut down my client.”  John developed a strategy based on what was best for his client in the long-term by admitting the patent infringement claims and, thereby, initially denying the competing company the ability to assert the more damaging trade secret claim and quickly enjoin his client.

Well, what do you think?

Ancient cultures were obsessed with tracking and measuring time long before Simon Vouet's 1627 "Time Vanquished by Love, Hope & Beauty." But in the business world, to manage something, you have to measure it.

Phyllis Korkki, who reports on workplace issues for The New York Times, recently tag-teamed with Robert Pozen to challenge the notion that putting in more hours is a sign of productivity and value.

Pozen, a former attorney who’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a lecturer at Harvard Business School, is the author of Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours (HarperCollins).

Among other benefits, Korkki offers that regular breaks not only reduce stress but also amp up creativity.  In a second, related Times article, Pozen echoes what law firms have been hearing with increased frequency and sincerity from clients for at least a decade:  Measure results, not hours.

He says there are three things most of us could do to significantly boost our efficiency: Run better meetings, read smarter and let go of our Inner Perfectionists as writers.

This last point reminded me of what my friend Mike O’Horo calls DemandTrigger — the business need that helps drive a sale.  In my case, I might write for a living, but what I sell (i.e., my Demand Trigger) is time management.

As in, let me get that off your to-do list.

Because chances are good that every busy, high-earning lawyer or other executive has some writing chore on their desk that they keep putting off.  It’s simply competing with too many other priorities for which the Cost of Doing Nothing (thanks again, Mike) is less than finishing or editing that article-practice group description-proposal or whatever.

But, hey, who’s counting?

Even without two of the most beautiful Beautiful People ever (actors Julie Christie and Omar Sharif), it would be pretty easy to sympathize with Yuri Zhivago and Lara Antipova.  Boris Pasternak’s 1957 novel had these two characters (and others) endure rape, frostbite, sword hacking, stampedes, starvation and the Ukranian Front.

In addition to all of that, our protagonists had to deal with a bunch of cranky Bolsheviks.  To wit:

What could possibly make these revolutionaries feel so fed up?  Or, turn to the communist model?  Drive Soviet-made cars?

I found an answer in the Nov. 2, 2012, New York Times.  Writing about her family’s downsizing (from “a 4,000-square-foot, 10-room apartment in a prewar building on Park Avenue” to a “space on the edge of Chinatown that I could imagine myself living in: an approximately 2,200-square-foot duplex loft with a terrace and mesmerizing views of a quaint street in Little Italy, a sliver of the Brooklyn Bridge towers and the Frank Gehry skyscraper under construction in Lower Manhattan”), here’s part of what Suzanne Slesin had to say for herself:

But I would be moving to a place that had a fraction of the display and storage space to which I was accustomed. We put our uptown apartment on the market, and I truly believed that I could live with the sparer aesthetic the downtown space seemed to cry out for.

Of course, I had my untouchables: the pastel-hued Russel Wright dinnerware; a set of antique gold-rimmed red china; the Victorian silver and vintage Bakelite frames that held decades of family photographs; a pair of huge urns from Fez; a large 1950s fish platter I had spied in the window of a shop in the Palais Royal in Paris; and the groups of ceramic Chinese People’s Republic revolution figures. (I particularly enjoyed seeing the Chinese workers rub shoulders with an antique Meissen figurine of Marie Antoinette that had been a fixture in my parents’ living room.) But I also dreaded the thought that some things would not make the move, and the idea of downsizing started to bother me more than I cared to admit. Moving is stressful enough, and as I happen to be rather sentimental, the idea of parting with things like my mother’s banquet-size damask tablecloths, a group of her old perfume bottles (still in their ribboned boxes), my collection of 1940s “ugly vases” and even my children’s long-discarded toys — even if I could not possibly use them in our new loft — brought me close to tears. I bravely decided to have a private yard sale in the apartment; little did I guess that some of our oldest and closest friends would haggle over my fissured Ironstone platters, ruby-colored wine goblets and antique monogrammed guest towels.

Wow.

My buddy, Colleen Wainwright, shared several awesome tips yesterday on how to make you and your writing sound more natural and down-to-earth.  Here’s one suggestion that really jumped out at me:

Some people can avoid slipping into their Plastic-Man Voice by using dictation. One terrific way to sound more like yourself in your writing is to have someone interview you.

She’s right.

I like to read what I’ve written out loud.  It makes it MUCH harder for anything too lofty or unnatural or unintended to get by.

Scriptwriters do this all the time.  The Table Read is a major step in the script editing process, when the entire cast gets together and each actor reads their part.

Here’s what that looks like:

Visitors come to law firm Web sites mostly to check out lawyer bios.  It’s a fact.

Here’s a quick video offering five simple tips to improve yours:

Want more?

Your Web site is like a grocery shelf. How does it display your products? Does it make your readers feel like foreigners?

Yabancı

As a recent foreign exchange student spending four months in Istanbul, I didn’t need to be reminded that I was a foreigner.

Yet, virtually wherever I went, I overheard yabancı, the Turkish word for foreigner.

I knew I was different, but having others remind me was uncomfortable.

For example, the first time I went to the grocery store, I forgot my dictionary.   As a result, I got home with lumpy cottage cheese, a jar of tomato paste, and moldy vegetables.

This feeling of being an outsider might be how Web site visitors struggle upon encountering unfamiliar content.  They, too, can feel like yabancılar.

Readers visit sites, particularly sites in the professional services sector, looking for assurance and solutions.  Users look for providers who can fix their problems and make their lives easier.  They’re also seeking some kind of personal connection to feel like less like a yabancı.

So, sites should encourage visitors to relax and stay put.  Consider how well your site engages your visitors and if it is…

1. Coherent: Well-organized content is attractive and inviting, encouraging readers to spend time on your site.
2. Down-to-Earth:  Readers are often put off by jargon.  Use simple, clear language.
3. Brief: Remember the Nielsen effect.  Long looks hard, and hard doesn’t get read.

Eventually, I didn’t need a dictionary.  What I remember best, however, were the times that my Turkish neighbors  welcomed me and helped with my broken Turkish.  They made me feel like less like a yabancı.