What I hear in the blog is that the legal world has fundamentally changed and to survive you all have to focus on the “real value”. My Current Best Thinking (which parallel’s what was said here) is that the recent economic change is fundamental and involves very different business priorities. They, in order, are:
1) RELATIONSHIPS – are the most important resource we as business owners have. Invest in them without regard to money.
2) COMMUNITY – using our relationships to establish communities around our values.
3) VALUE – with these first two in place we can now focus on providing real value.
4) SERVE – first, exchange for money second. Serving is the key.

I think this is probably the place where clients really get themselves in more trouble, at least from what I can see in my soon-to-be practice area (healthcare licensure issues). That advice from peers (or even worse, state regulatory investigators!) is often less valuable than free.

One of my future collegues, Latonia Denise Wright, has recently written on her blog, “Nursing Law & Order” that she regularly gets inquiries from nurses who have taken “legal advice” from state Nursing Board investigators and are surprised when that advise does not help and sometimes hurts the nurse. Or when they don’t think the problem is a “real” problem (http://advocatefornurses.typepad.com/my2cents/2008/07/i-didnt-think-the-nursing-board-would-revoke-my-license-for-this.html).

The leads me to completely disagree with Matt Homann’s statement about our advice being the least valuable we have to offer; au contraire, I think our advise (counsel) is absolutely the most valuable thing we have to offer to clients. Information is a commodity and not particularly valuable by itself. The ability to synthesize that information is where we can create that value. Thus, giving away information costs very little – the potential client will get that information from some other source if I don’t provide it to them. But it will show good faith and help show the potential client that I am at least in touch with the basic information applicable to their situation.

Marc

The same information, fragmentary and generalized but used by someone who is gathering ‘free’ advice to avoid hiring an attorney, they will never hire an attorney unless they screw up.

You don’t have to worry about the type of client who will never hire you. You have to satisfy the client who would be inclined to hire you.

The fine line is important. Give out enough information to let people know you know what you are doing. And do so in a context that no one could believe an attorney/client relationship is established.

More and more, clients are able to get everything they need online–including free advice from their peers–so you really need to consider how to market yourself so that you’re still deemed useful. Is it that you, as the professional with years of schooling, are more knowledgeable and more reliable of a source than the online unknown?

This also brings about the question of how much free advice lawyers should give. One of the best ways to find clients is to create a relationship with them before they need a lawyer, through the use of seminars and blogs. The information you give away for free is an investment in future business, but there is a fine line between too much and too little. If you give the potential client too little information, then you create the impression of being useless and only full of advice they could easily find on their own. But if you give the potential client too much information, then they’ll have no reason to hire you.