LinkedIn for Lawyers

1. LinkedIn The Basics
Hilary Schneider, Business Development
Manager
Brown Wright Stein

2. Outline
– Introduction – why LinkedIn is useful for B2B and why
it's important for BD in this firm
– Your Profile – your unique story
– What it is & isn't
– Summary – why it's important
– Specialties - keywords
– No spell checker
– How to add a photo
– Your Connections – how it works
– How to find connections & invite them to link to you
– How to add connections
– Accepting or declining connection requests

3. What is LinkedIn?
• A tool for using the internet to find people
and be found by people
• The world’s largest online business
networking site
• Currently has around 100m members, with
one new member being added every
minute

4. Why should you use it?
• According to the LinkedIn website
– Average member’s household income is
$91,566
– 63% of users hold a university or
postgraduate degree
– 21% are middle managers or above
– A lot of professionals, business advisors,
potential referrers and potential clients on
LinkedIn

5. How is LinkedIn useful for
Lawyers?
• Helpful for building your network of people
in related industries – accountants,
financial advisors
• Leverage your relationships with current
clients to work towards gaining additional
clients
• Expand your network of suppliers and gain
access to products or services that
complement the services you provide

6. How is LinkedIn useful for
Lawyers?
• Find new groups or
associations that might
provide speaking
opportunities
• Help with finding / hiring
new employees with
specific expertise &
experience
• Help you to become
recognised as an expert
in the industry
• Increase your brand and
overall credibility in the
market
• Job searching

7. Your connections
LinkedIn makes your extended network visible:
• Your Connections
Your trusted friends and colleagues 79
Two degrees away
Friends of friends; each connected to one of
your connections 11,400+
Three degrees away
Reach these users through a friend and one of
their friends1, 149,400+
Total users you can contact through an
Introduction 1,160,900+

8. Your Profile
• The unique experience you have gained
during your career, coupled with the
unique relationships you have carefully
developed during your career gives you a
tremendous advantage over the person
who doesn't understand how to use
LinkedIn.

9. Searching on LinkedIn
• The key to successful searches is the
more connections you have, the better
your search results will be.
• 50 – 70 quality connections is the
minimum. The ongoing process of adding
connections will always pay off because
each time you add a number 1 connection,
you're adding number 2s and 3s.

10. Searching on LinkedIn
• Once you land on a search that produces quality
targets for you, LinkedIn allows you to save the
search. One of the best, but often overlooked,
feature of LinkedIn.
• Click "save", then choose whether you want
LinkedIn to send you an email weekly or monthly
to notify you if a new person who meets your
search criteria has been found in your network.
• The Advanced People Search is one of the
most valuable tools in LinkedIn.

11. 4 key elements to a good Profile
• Excellent, descriptive headline
• The number of contacts you have and
recommendations
• Content within your profile
• Keywords within your profile

12. Your Summary
• Most consistently
underutilised section of
the profile
• If you only have a few
minutes to share your
professional story with a
potential client, business
partner or referrer, what
would you say?
• Use your summary to tell
your story in a friendly
conversational way

13. Your summary
• Briefly summarise
specific, quantifiable
accomplishments
• Direct the reader to a few
of the most important
parts of your profile
• Focus on what you are
doing now, how you can
help the reader and what
you plan to be doing in
the future

14. Key to social media / networking is
freely sharing your knowledge &
expertise
• Builds trust, once they trust you, want to
do business with you
• Box.net files – upload Word, PDF, Excel,
articles, firm brochures
• Google Presentation / Slideshare
• Video increasingly important as part of
many companies branding efforts

15. Finding and adding connections
• The winner of the searching
aspect of LinkedIn is the
person who has a lot of
connections
• Only connect with people you
know and trust
• It’s your network, a possession
you’ve worked your whole
career to build
• Recommended goal to acquire
at least 200 – 250 connections
if you want your searches to
be useful

16. Accepting/Declining Connection
Requests
You have 6 options when responding to an
invitation:
• Accept, they immediately becomes a first-
degree connection
• Reply, send them a message without them
becoming part of your network
• Delete, request goes into the trash

17. Accepting/Declining Connection
Requests
• Archive, the invitation will be stored in your
archive folder, so you can reconsider
accepting the invitation at a later time. It’s
a good idea to look at the person’s Profile
to learn more about them before archiving
their request
• Ignore, the invitation will be archived.
Again, check their profile, see if there’s a
reason to connect.

18. Accepting/declining requests
• Forward, you can forward the invitation to
any of your first-level connections who
might have useful information about them,
before you decide whether to accept their
invitation

19. Summary
• LinkedIn is useful for finding potential
clients, contacts, referrers and employees
• It helps build your network and leverage
your relationships and build your online
brand; get speaking opportunities; find
employees; find a job
• The more connections you have, the more
useful LinkedIn will be for you

20. Summary
• Your Summary and Profile are very
important and are worth spending some
time over
• Summary directs people to important parts
of your profile
• Profile is like you business plan and
outlines your unique experience and how
you can help the reader

21. Actions
• Write your Summary
and Profile in Word,
(no spell checker in
LinkedIn). Ensure it
tells your unique story
and include good
keywords
• Upload your photo
• Add your connections

22. Hilary Schneider
Business Development Manager
Brown Wright Stein
T 02 9394 1067
F 02 9394 1011
E has@bwslawyers.com.au
W www.bwslawyers.com.au