Michael Bodekaer

Hi everyone,

This is just a quick heads up, to let you know that applications for PG2012 has opened.
Be sure you check out the fun videos and more information about the big event here:
Proejct Getaway 2012 Event

Just put together a short little video to show my latest little gimmick – the inspirationPad – which I’ve used for a few weeks now and it works really well.

FYI I use the cheapest iPad 1, 16GB, and the beautiful Vogel wall mount.

I often speak with very bright people who dream about becoming entrepreneurs.
They explain how they feel trapped in their current 9-5 jobs but are afraid to make the “dangerous” jump into unknown world, where fixed monthly salaries are a thing of the past.

In this great guest blog post, a dear friend of mine, Kristian Holte, shares his story, on how he quit his job at a law firm 3 months ago, and already today has a profitable business!
Very inspirational and informative 3 minutes read.

******************

Yes, you got it right. It is actually possible to start your own law firm and earn more than enough to survive. Is it easy? No. Possible? Definitely. I did it. And you can do it too.

In this post I’ll outline 5 key principles that made me go from dissatisfied employee to legal entrepreneur in just 3 months.

I quit my job on 1 May 2010 and as of today 10 August 2010 my company Simply Law is thriving and attracting more and more qualified and interesting clients each day.

1. Value-Based Pricing

As you probably know most of the legal industry bills by the hour. There’s really no point since the interests of the attorney and the client often aren’t aligned using this model. The client is interested in getting the job done well swiftly and the attorney is interested in spending as many hours as possible.
So let’s reverse that.

It is so easy to differentiate yourself here by offering value-based pricing. Maybe you think this means that you can’t charge as much. Not at all. It only means that you have to consider the value of each case and price accordingly.

Value can be many things. Urgency, mental pain, accessibility, monetary value and strategic advantages are factors to consider when pricing your services. The pricing of your competitors as well. When you’re starting out your costs are low and you don’t need to price as high to break even. Use this to your advantage by comparining your pricing to your competitors’ when making an offer.

2. Compete on Quality

Don’t compete on price. This is an endless spiral which drags you downwards and which does nothing but attract the wrong type of clients. It makes you earn less and less money over time as well. You don’t want that. Instead, position yourself as a speciliast within some or a couple of fields, obtain cutting-edge knowledge and market yourself by sharing this knowledge with current and prospective clients.

3. Lean and Mean

Keep your costs low. I don’t even have a real office. I work from home. Or from the coffee shop. I decide myself. I rarely have physical meetings, because I find they often aren’t necessary. Clients don’t find them necessary either, apparently.

I use a range of free or low-cost online tools, I’ve outsourced the secretary function so I don’t have to answer the phone all day. I get e-mailed once my “secretary” has received a call from a current or prospective client.

In short: It isnt’ necessary to reside in a castle and to have chocolate with the firm’s name on it. Focus
on being excellent and communicating this to the right people. Then, you can have the chocolate later. And the impressive marble office.

4. Pick Your Niche

Have an idea of which niche you want to focus on. But don’t start out too narrow. I have chosen intellectual property law as my area of specialty and 75 % of my revenue is generated by IP-work. However, I also have a client base within the restaurant business. Now, I hadn’t anticipated that, but along the line I noticed an opening here.

So: Pick a main niche, but don’t be too specific and picky to start out with. There is plenty of time to specialize narrowly as you go along. Someday you’ll be THE expert in your niche.

5. Market Yourself Everyday

A lot of attorneys don’t like to market themselves. But this part of being a legal entrepreneur is crucial.
I enjoy marketing myself as much as I enjoy pracitising IP-law. Sometimes more.

Set up your own marketing system which you execute on a daily basis. I spend about 50 % of my time marketing Simply Law. If you do this well, you don’t have to worry about attracting the right clients.

This was a quick overview of some of the principles I’ve found to be useful. If you have any questions or
comments please feel free to e-mail me at holte@simplylaw.dk or simply post a comment below.

Kristian Holte, legal counsel
Simply Law

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Do you have a similar story? Please share it below in the comments! I love to hear these success stories!

I first got to know about Prezi a few weeks ago, and I was immediately impressed by how easy and amazingly cool interactive presentations you can create with nearly no effort!
So when I shortly after was invited to present at DTU in Copenhagen (Denmark’s very own MIT :), I naturally decided to test out this cool tool and see what it could really do when pushed to the limits.

Having worked with interactive and animated online solutions for many years, I naturally felt at home right away. My past experiences is by no means a precondition for you to be able to use Prezi though. Its easy and intuitive interface is truly amazing, and there is a bunch of great videos that will get you started in minutes.

The result? The audience was super impressed, and Prezi surely helped in keeping the audience “glued” and engaged while adding a great touch and wow effect to the whole presentation :)

Interested in seeing the presentation?

Below is a slightly shorter version with minor modifications, to make it more “online-friendly”. Keep in mind that it is intended as an aid for a speaking presentation – not a presentation in itself. So you’ll miss out on all the goodies and jokes in between the lines ;)

Sit back, relax, and enjoy Prezi in action

Create Your Own Free Prezi

The best of the whole thing? It’s free!
Just go to www.prezi.com and create your own presentations right away.
You can even import your old PowerPoint presentations, and give them some cool transitioning effects.

A lot of people asked for the presentation afterwards (surely for the wonderful animations ;), so I put it up for you here.
Feel free to share it with your friends.

Thanks everyone and Stardust especially for setting up and arranging everything so well!

Note: It is quite heavy on graphics and video, so you might have to let it load for a short time.

I love to reduce unnecessary work and clutter, and always seek to eliminate such things quickly.

As a result, I decided to go paperless 5 months ago, and now wanted to share with you my experiences from running a paperless startup office. So here is a brief post, to help you go paperless today and even protect the environment at the same time.

What you need:

• iPhone
• Evernote
• JotNot (iPhone App)
• RightSignature (Web + iPhone App)
• Optional: Personal Assistant

Scenarios:

Here are some usual scenarios, and how I use the above to handle them effectively.

Bill received via snail mail

[Total time: 1 minute]

1. Scan with JotNot iPhone App (makes it look like a perfect scan)
2. Forward to assistant with header “Task: Please pay and archive”
3. Recycle paper and get a cup of coffee
   
   It now gets paid by my assistant, and the document is put in a special folder in my Evernote account which my assistant has access to. I can now also search all my documents and easily find them later on, as the text is OCR scanned automatically in Evernote. Annual reporting becomes a simple export of my Evernote folder for the accountant.

Electronic document needs to be signed

[Total time: 3 minutes]

1. Upload document to RightSignature website
2. Sign document using iPhone RightSignature App
3. Done.
   
   No need to print, sign, scan etc. RightSignature now emails the signed document to you with a special signature certificate attached to it. You can easily forward the email to whomever need the contract, or forward it to your Evernote email account for archiving.

Paper contract needs to be signed

[Total time: 2 minutes]

1. Sign on paper
2. Scan with JotNot iPhone App
3. Forward to Evernote email account, or assistant with header “Task: Please archive contract”
4. Recycle paper and relax while wondering why life is so wonderful
   
   Very easy. And again, Evernote allows you to easily search for documents by OCR scanning everything automatically.

I hope this gave you some inspiration as to how you can reduce paper and clutter in your daily life and work.

I can warmly recommend going paperless – the technology is now ready to make it easy and convenient!

Clay Shirky (author of Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations) recently presented at TED about social media. The presentation is fairly simple and straightforward, however as always, Clay is very good at providing good real-life examples on how the social media should be applied.
I especially like the example on the Obama campaign about 12 minutes into the presentation.

Back in January, I also had the fortunate experience of meeting Clay in person to discuss the potential and dangers of using social media for larger corporations. It was without doubt a very intriguing experience. I especially enjoyed  ”picking” his brain on his understanding of the hundres of interesting ways in which social media is being applied today – an understanding and knowledge which I really admire and envy Clay for.

I can also warmly recommend Clay’s blog dedicated to the book on soecial media: http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/

Related external articles

• Pure gold nuggets from Shirky (dougbelshaw.com)
• Books for Understanding Social Media (800ceoread.com)
• Clay Shirky on Historical Significance of Social Media (myventurepad.com)

Probably the most important part of determining whether any new idea has a potential, is to be able to understand the current and future market demand.

With the increasing availability of online tools to analyze the massive amounts of search and social media data out there, we can luckily now much better predict the market potential of these ideas.

Here are the most impactful tools which requires the least amount of effort in terms of data gathering and analysis.

#4: Job Searches

A great way to determine which trends are actually starting to become real and play a major role, is by searching through the open job databases which offers data on which types of jobs are most widely requested.

Read more here: http://smallbiztrends.com/2009/04/how-to-spot-technology-trends.html

#3: Twitter Searches

Social media tool Twitter offers a great and easy way to analyze the millions of tweets updated daily. Using the Twitter Trends/Search tool or the TweetStats tool, you can quickly determine which topics are most popular at any given time. This gives a great overview of what the world is thinking about these days, and allows you to find ways to leverage these thinking patterns/demands in your own ideas and products.

Read more here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/03/what-the-trend-finally-a-way-to-make-sense-of-twitter-trends/

#2: Google Trends

The recently very popular and useful Google Trends tool allows you to not only determine the current popularity of the topics of your interest, but also the historical popularity – giving you the opportunity to derive some interesting future demand curves. Research has shown that this tool can greatly help improve the precision of demand prediction models, but you may even use it to make quick “back of the envelope” analyses of your many business and product ideas.

Read more here: http://www.economist.com/finance/displaystory.cfm?STORY_ID=13497048

#1: Wordtracker

Wordtracker allows you to do really quick and dirty analyses of your ideas when brainstorming many potential opportunities. This tool is great, as it combines both the current demand/popularity of various topics (by combining many search engines simultaneously) and the current supply (websites offering the information/products/services related to the topic).

By using this tool, you can very quickly determine whether there is already a high level of competition on the market your are considering to enter, and whether the market demand is too small relative to this existing supply.

The WordTracker team is already working on a new and improved version, with interesting metrics such as Frequency, Competitiveness and Commerciallity.

Read more here: http://www.wordtracker.com/blog/new-wordtracker-keyword-tool-is-coming/

Additional Suggestions

Do you have suggestions for other tools on how to determine market size, potential and/or trends? Please go ahead and share below!

Related articles

• 10 Steps to Advanced Keyword Research (mt-soft.com.ar)
• 8 Excellent Tools to Extract Insights from Twitter Streams (socialmediatoday.com)
• Twitter incorporates search in home page (bigclever.blogspot.com)