How to make paralegals your Product Champions
Carl Morrison, the host of Legal Talk Network, has long held that paralegals in essence are project managers, like a project manager at a construction company. They manage cases, workloads, clients, partners and attorneys. They are the bedrock/cornerstone of any law firm, small or large. Lawyers are trained to interpret and apply the law – paralegals are the cogs that keep everything in a law firm smooth and running, making lawyers’ work possible. How to work more with paralegals, the ones actually using the legal software:
1. Be friends with the Uber drivers of law firms
Most senior sales reps are hired for their existing network in an industry. So who are the paralegals tight with in town? Who chats up paralegals in person at their law firm on a weekly basis? Legal software sales reps? Nope. Process servers.
Who has a giant network of paralegals who like them? Process servers.
Who should you be taking for dinner? Process servers.
Who should you be trying to hire as affiliate marketers or just straight up hire? Process servers.
Process servers are like the nice Uber driver that you keep getting when you’re in a small town and there are only five Uber drivers…
2. Which companies do paralegals love?
Court reporters who send them flowers! Don’t overlook the marketing tactics of the litigation support providers that have been around forever. For example, a court reporting company that sends their paralegal customers flowers on their birthday. They have a text field in their sign up form to capture their birthday. So when a paralegal needs to call around to court reporting companies, they remember the one that sent them flowers 💐.
Caveat: This will only work if paralegals are the decision maker that ‘order’ your product, but works especially well if you have a usage based revenue model.
3. Lack of Innovation could be your Super Power
People are attracted to what they are familiar with. Even if a court reporting landing page looks boring to you, to a paralegal it looks like a company they trust. Don't reinvent the wheel, communicate in a way they are accustom to.
Get your brand into the Big League of Brands
Guest lecture as part of a legal-tech course for paralegals. All the students will get a login to your software and become proficient at using it, so when they start looking for a job at a law firm:
- Resume: They list your software as one of their skills on their resume that is read by multiple law firms.
- Education > Marketing: Your content becomes given recognition for being 'educational' rather than purely ‘marketing’. Labels mean a lot to first impressions.
Lumose Marketplace has partnered with the Toronto School of Management to provide a legal tech course for student paralegals and law firms 🤓. We’re training the next generation of paralegals on all the know-how of legal tech. You can be part of it.
Together, we’ve designed a legal tech course for paralegal students to show them what the field is all about. The course will be taught in conjunction with the college as part of their paralegal diploma, then offered virtually in July and October to students and law firms.
Get inspired by other software companies who offer courses through colleges here.
Course Outline
The course is a feature of different legal tech companies to equip paralegal students with an in-depth understanding of the tools that will make them more efficient and skillful practitioners. They’ll carry this know-how with them into their future law firms and have the unique ability to increase productivity – no matter the practice area – by tapping into legal tech.
Students will develop a basic understanding of the six main categories of legal software, be familiarized with software for each practice area, and hear from guest speakers from leading legal tech companies. Each lecture will focus on a different practice area or paralegal tasks and will include an in-depth feature of a legal tech company.
Let us know which category of legal-tech your company could be a guest speaker for here.
