Communication

Vickie,

I am an independent Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, but for one attorney-client, I work in-house one day a week. I no longer want to work in-house, as I prefer to focus on the attorney-clients that hire me as an independent consulting expert. I am very successful and do not need this job but I don’t know how to tell the attorney without burning a bridge or damaging what’s been a great relationship. What should I do?

Liz, RN, CLNC

Hi Liz,

Congratulations on making a decision that will ultimately strengthen your CLNC^® business. Start by telling the attorney you are expanding your legal nurse consulting business and can no longer work in-house for him. Emphasize that you value your business relationship and will always be available to him as an independent Certified Legal Nurse Consultant. Next, give examples of how well this works with your other attorney-clients. Finally, emphasize the speed of electronic communication and your availability for personal meetings. Since you are already successful as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, you have very little to lose and the attorney-client has everything to gain. Go for it!

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share your tips for saying no to attorney-clients.

We are bombarded with thousands of messages and communications in a single day. So how can you possibly stay in the mind of attorney-clients who are bombarded with email following them everywhere, clients calling and staffers vying for their attention? The CLNC^® Pros share 6 strategies for fun, creative and noninvasive ways to retie the connections with your attorney-clients. The goal: to remind them you are there to make the next case a little easier and more profitable.

Stay in Touch

1. After a case is finished, I stay in touch with my attorney-clients, even if they don’t have another case for me immediately. I keep it light and focus on how they are doing and how their legal practice is going. Many of them proceed to tell me about cases they are working on, which creates opportunities as well as trust.
   – Dale Barnes, RN, MSN, CLNC

Add Your Attorney-Clients to Your Gift List

2. During the holiday season, remember your attorney-clients. Mailing holiday cards will keep your name in front of them and fresh in their minds. Give special tokens of appreciation to your preferred attorneys, their secretaries and paralegals.
   – Suzanne E. Arragg, RN, BSN, CDONA/LTC, CLNC

3. I always acknowledge my attorney-clients at the holiday season. The gifts are not expensive, but I always send something to acknowledge our relationship. Additionally, I send birthday cards. These small gestures create a friendly and professional relationship. It especially pays off when a new attorney-prospect calls me and tells me one of my attorney-clients has referred me and has said that not only do I do a good job, but I am easy to work with, approachable and flexible. Those are the best referrals. Then I know I have done a good job of building successful relationships with my attorney-clients.
   – Dale Barnes, RN, MSN, CLNC

4. Once a year, I take my attorney-clients out to lunch (my treat) to show them how much I appreciate their business. This not only strengthens our relationship, it often leads to more work for me!
   – Dorene Goldstein, RNC, CLNC

5. I send congratulatory notes and sometimes small gifts that have significance. I often told one of my oldest attorney-clients (not that he’s old…he’s one of my first clients) that he was a tough old attorney, and that he was one of my clients that didn’t require a lot of hand-holding. He always thought that was funny. He had a particularly large jury verdict in one of his cases. Instead of sending him a nice little note, I sent a cactus to him with a card that said “You are tough as a cactus. You thrive in adversity, and you don’t need water very often.” That was probably 15 years ago, and he still has that cactus in his office. He also tells me that it’s the only plant he hasn’t killed!
   – Jane Hurst, RN, CLNC

Feed the Attorneys Information

6. I retie the connection with information. I send out an oversized postcard with my contact information on one side and an article or fun facts on the other. I send different postcards quarterly. For example, when swine flu was the hot topic, I sent out a postcard with facts that everyone should know about how to protect themselves and stay healthy. These postcards are a big hit with the whole office staff. It reminds them that I am still out there without me calling them. If you notice something of interest to your attorney-client in a newspaper, journal or magazine, clip it out and send it with a personal FYI note.
   – Dorene Goldstein, RNC, CLNC

Thanks to all the CLNC^® Pros for sharing their strategies to retie the connection with attorney-clients.

Success Is Inside!

When it comes to email addresses, you should only have as many as you can manage, but three addresses should be more than enough. Why three? Simple – to triage your communications.

Your first email address is the most important – it’s the one you include on your CLNC^® business cards and letterhead. This is the email address you’ll use to communicate with your attorney-clients, prospects and Certified Legal Nurse Consultant subcontractors. This is for professional communication only and is the email address you’ll check every 2-3 hours.

Your second email address is your public-facing email address. This is an address you can use for queries from your legal nurse consulting website and advertising (such as the brochures you pass out at legal conferences). If you have to register at a help forum or app store for your smartphone, this is the email address you’ll use. This address will naturally get a lot of spam from the businesses where you register and from people who scrape email addresses from the Internet. You probably won’t need to check this one more than once a day.

Your third email address is your personal one for friends and family. I’d even recommend you create this address through a different system, such as Gmail or Live.com, than your primary addresses. Keeping it separate ensures there’s no chance of sending your vacation photos to your entire professional contact list. How frequently you check this email address is up to you.

Finally, there are what Tom calls throw-down email addresses. These are temporary webmail addresses you create and then abandon when you don’t want them anymore. You can use a throw-down email address to register at websites or with vendors that require an email address before you can get information about a service or product, such as software for your legal nurse consulting business. Once you obtain the information and decide not to purchase the product or service or if the address starts to collect too much spam, you can abandon it and never use it again. If you choose to purchase the product, then go back and do so with your public-facing address so that you’ll receive updates on support, upgrades, etc.

I can’t remember how we ever lived without email, but I can remember living without too much of it. If you’re a smartphone user, most smartphones can be set up to check any number of email accounts. Owning three email addresses will help you triage important communications and avoid the time-sucking, distracting ones.

Success Is Inside!

I recently brought an idea into a quarterly all-day executive meeting fully expecting us to spend substantial time discussing it. We did, but not in the way I expected. That one idea stimulated a discussion that took the entire meeting and led us into a completely different direction. By the end of the day, we landed on a new and improved idea, one that was much better than my original.

The kind of springboarding that happened that day rarely happens when we are communicating via email, which we certainly do a lot of here in my office. Call me old fashioned, but in my opinion only the dialog that happens when people sit around the table together and springboard ideas off one another stimulates this level of idea generation.

The same applies to you and your attorney-clients. Email works for the majority of your routine communications, but when was the last time you sat around the table with your attorney-clients and had a deep discussion about a case? Try it on your next significant case after your attorney-client has had the opportunity to review your report. I promise you will challenge, stimulate and surprise each other. Not to mention that you’ll take that case analysis to a much higher level. If you’re not springboarding with your attorney-clients regularly, it’s time to start now.

Success Is Inside!

One of the most important strategies I use to build successful attorney-client relationships is to remain available and accessible to my clients. Even when things are extremely hectic and busy, I never let my attorney-clients sense that I am too busy for them. When they request something, I respond promptly with a short answer or suggest a time to talk. Mobile devices make it easy for me to reply to all requests.

The second strategy I use for building and maintaining successful relationships with my attorney clients is a “courtesy call”. This comes in very handy with my existing clients and doubles as a marketing strategy! I am in various stages of litigation with my cases, so if there is a lapse in workload on a case I make a courtesy call. Checking in with a friendly hello and calling for a status update on the case reminds the attorney that I am committed and thorough, and it is one of the best ways to discuss new cases and referrals to other attorneys. I love it when the attorney says, “I was just going to call you about a new case that I want you to review.” I would say eight out of ten times the “courtesy call” results in more work on the existing case, a new case or a referral to a new client. It’s a win-win situation, which brings me to my third strategy.

My third strategy is to update my communication on a case even if I’ve already written the report. No matter how much you research a case, you will wake up with those bright ideas and ah-ha moments. When I get those bright ideas, I communicate them to my attorney-clients. They are always grateful to know that I am still thinking about their cases, keeping them current and guiding them down the right path.

Guest Blogger Profile

Julie Somen-Becker, RN, BSN, CLNC owns and operates Chicago Legal Nurse Consultants, Inc. She has been a nurse for 14 years specializing in neonatal intensive care, clinical education and management. Julie’s CLNC^® business specializes in neonatal cases and resuscitation issues.

One of our CLNC^® pros, Suzanne Arragg, shares how losing sight of her business plan almost cost her a valuable attorney-client and what she did to come back even stronger.

“A couple of years ago a law firm I had worked with for three years noticeably stopped sending new cases to me and emails I sent on existing cases went unanswered. My relationship with the paralegal paid off. She called me to let me know that the partners were shopping for another nurse consultant. She told me she was advocating for me and had expressed her concern to the attorneys that she felt it was unfair they hadn’t let me know. I thanked her for her phone call and as I hung up, my head started to spin.

This was a reality check. Too often, we become comfortable with the daily routine of business and forget the importance of spending time each day on our business plan and marketing. Even if it is only 10-15 minutes, we should never lose sight of its importance.

Once my head stopped whirling and my thoughts became more organized, I began to refocus on my CLNC^® business practices and market more. Within a couple of months, new cases began to arrive and I picked up new attorney-clients. But more importantly, I did not lose sight of the value of my existing attorney-clients. I continued to call the partners and express my commitment to servicing their law firm. Guess what? They called to set up a meeting to discuss moving forward. Since that time, our relationship is stronger than ever. In fact, at their request I have expanded my CLNC ^® services to meet their litigation needs.

In hindsight, I think their shopping experience was healthy not only for them, but for me as well. They quickly realized the communication and work product of others did not compare to mine. I learned that taking the time to build strong relationships with attorney-clients and their staff has value beyond the dollar and that losing sight of my business plan was a prescription for potential failure.”

Suzanne E. Arragg, RN, BSN, CDONA/LTC, CLNC

Success Is Inside!

Everything is marketing. This is a business principle every successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultant knows and it applies to every part of your CLNC^® business. When I say everything you do is marketing, that includes your email address.

The bare minimum branding for an email address should be your company name (or a logical derivative) @ whatever email service you are using. Your email address should reflect your professionalism and that it is a business email address, not a personal one. Who would you rather do business with, SSmithAssociates@vmail.com or LuvsKatz1978@vmail.com?

At the same time, always keep a separate personal email address. This decreases the chances that inappropriate communications go to the wrong individuals such as your attorney-prospects and clients.

Your website is a basic marketing strategy that connects your domain name to your email address and establishes your CLNC^® brand. You can register your website’s domain name with any of the big registration companies such as GoDaddy.com or Register.com for $3-$10/month. They all have website-building tools that will help you create a simple 2-3 page website for your CLNC^® business.

All you need to get started is a homepage (first page they see) that describes what you do as a CLNC^® consultant, perhaps with an abbreviated list of CLNC^® services, a Contact Us page and an About Me page. Keep it simple and professional-looking. If you can’t use the site-building tool, consider hiring a designer or someone from your local community college’s web design program to create one for you from scratch. You can always add bells and whistles later once your CLNC^® business is going strong.

Here’s the best thing about registering your own domain name. Once you do, the domain becomes part of your email address. This means you become S.Smith@SmithAssociates.com instead of S.Smith1979@vmail.com The same domain registration site where you purchased and set up your domain can walk you through the process of setting up one or more email accounts. As long as you keep your domain name, you keep your email address. You become one with your branding. Remember, when an attorney sees your business card one of his first impressions of you is your email address. Make it a good one.

Finally, remember to login to the NACLNC^® Community at LegalNurse.com and review the guidelines on use of the CLNC^® Certification mark and the NACLNC^® collective mark before you register your domain name. For example, you cannot include CLNC^® or NACLNC^® in your domain name since they’re registered trademarks that belong to Vickie Milazzo Institute.

With more and more business being conducted via email, Certified Legal Nurse Consultants must remain in tune to their brands and what they’re branding through that email.

Success Is Inside!

Successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultants know that one of the tricks to effectively communicating with attorney-clients is to recognize the different forms of communication necessary to get a point across. One of the best methods I’ve found is this: explain the issue in plain English, then explain it again using an example and finally, explain how the example illustrates the point you just made twice.

I call this my “3-Ts” method of effective communication: “Tell’em, Tell’em again and Tell’em what you told them.” Repetition works. That’s why you hear an 800 number or “One day only, Sunday, Sunday, Sunday” repeated over and over again in a commercial. By repeating, they make sure the message is conveyed.

The first time you break down the complex issue into plain English and explain it to your attorney-client, he will mentally process the information on a theoretical basis (or think about his golf game). The second time you explain it, use a relevant example, which takes it from the theoretical world to the practical world, especially if it involves an example similar to the attorney-client’s case. Finally, the last time you tell him what you just told him, you explain not just the example, but the application. By this point, if you’ve done it correctly, you’ve effectively communicated a complex issue. If you’ve done it really well, the attorney may even be able to use your explanation in deposition or at trial.

The next time you’ve explained something to an attorney-client and been met by a blank look, quickly switch to Vickie’s 3-Ts to “Tell’em, Tell’em again and Tell’em what you told them.” You’ll see that look turn into a smile of enlightenment. Just don’t make me have to tell you again.

Success Is Inside!

My staff at Vickie Milazzo Institute is strong, opinionated and sometimes even mouthy – just the way I like them. When we hire a new employee I sometimes notice that at first they’re reluctant to give an opinion that’s different from the majority of the outspoken staffers. They are often a little slow to speak up and when they do it’s obvious they’re just tagging onto the others. It’s like the new person is afraid to get off the fence and jump down onto either side until they know what side everybody else is on. Here in Texas, if you’re sitting on a fence in a pasture full of longhorn cattle that may be a good idea. But when you’re in my conference room, it’s not a tactic for success with me or with the rest of the staff.

Here’s what happens when someone is just sucking up to me or a manager or the group at large and not really speaking for themselves; they get zero credit for their input. Their light, if any, may as well be under a bushel. If I wanted to hear a parrot, I would have hired one. Instead, I hired them for their expertise and I want to hear their opinion – whether I agree with it or not.

This sucking up temptation also applies to you as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant. When you’re in an attorney’s office discussing a case, that attorney doesn’t want you to be a “yes” person.

Attorneys are used to thinking for themselves and they expect the same of their CLNC^® consultants. They are used to intelligent disagreement and are trained to see both sides of an issue. They don’t need you to suck up; they need you to give them your professional opinion which should include both the strengths and weaknesses of the case (what I call “the good, the bad and the ugly”). That will help them cover all the issues and give them the ability to make their own intelligent decisions and judgments about the case. Knowing the strengths of the case is of little value if the attorney is blindsided by the “bad” side of the case at trial or in settlement conference.

When your attorney-clients get to trial, they’ll thank you for being your own person, even if that means sometimes giving opinions they clearly did not want to hear.

At Vickie Milazzo Institute I encourage people to speak up. New attorney-clients might not be as kind in helping you to develop your confidence. Don’t keep your light under a bushel – speak up and speak out.

Success Is Inside!

Over the years I’ve run into students at my CLNC^® Certification Programs who can’t easily answer a simple question. When you ask them what time it is, they proceed to tell you how to build a watch before they can say “It’s 11:15.” When this happens I want to shout, “Objection, non-responsive!” in the middle of a long, obviously rambling answer that has nothing to do with what I’ve asked them. I’m sure you all know someone like this. Hopefully that person’s not you.

The ability to “answer the question asked” is a quality successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultants must possess. Attorneys are crazy-busy people and don’t have the time to listen to unnecessary details or rambling communications. Attorneys are like the police on the old Dragnet TV series: they want “The facts ma’am, just the facts.” The next time you’re in an interview with an attorney-prospect and he says “Tell me about yourself” he’s not asking you to regurgitate your autobiography; he really wants to know what you’re going to do to help him win his cases.

If you veer off, even just occasionally, start today to retrain the way you think. Consciously observe if you are making a simple question or issue more complex than it really is. Pay attention to not only how you communicate but how you think. Assess for yourself how you analyze your day, a problem or a case. Do you quickly get to the essence or are you cluttering unnecessarily? Do you come up for air while answering a question? Do you occasionally pause to receive feedback or clarifying questions or do you go on until the person you’re talking to starts looking for a way out of the room?

The bottom line is that in your legal nurse consulting business and in your life, simplicity sells. When someone asks you a question answer it succinctly. Attorneys want information and they want it fast. Make sure what you tell them is what they need.

Success Is Inside!