Why Do Most Attorneys Hide Their Stories?

Most legal services are sold on relationships. You call a lawyer because someone recommends them, or you met them. So why are most attorney’s web sites, and legal marketing in general, so impersonal? It’s as if showing us who they are as people is somehow unprofessional. Well, I was fortunate enough to have a law-firm client who understood that the more effectively the firm connects with prospects, the more likely they were to land the client.

We interviewed each principal of the firm and had them tell their stories in full-page profiles. Though present, their education and experience was de-emphasized. Rather, we had the attorney tell us what motivated them, and why they did what they did. Wolfgram & Associates is a personal injury firm. Personal injury law involves, as I learned, delving into people’s problems. Medical problems. Personal problems. Frankly, I found it really depressing. So if you’re going to do personal injury law, and be effective at it. You really have to want to help people. Because every day when the attorney picks up the phone, they welcome tragedy into their offices.

Like magnets for misery, personal injury attorneys attract regular folks in the worst of circumstances. By definition, personal injury clients have demonstrable, compensable losses. Moreover, personal injury clients have more often than not been wronged by arrogant insurance companies, disrespected or dismissed by indifferent hospital administrators, abandoned by friends and spouses. You meet crippled, brain-injured, suffering children. You comfort people in the cold face of losses so profound and untimely that I hope you and I will never know them. Yet, as a personal injury attorney you must rise to the occasion each and every day and be a comfort for humble people in such circumstances.

At the same instant you as an attorney must be a fighter to get respect from in-house council and insurance adjusters who see your client as an acceptable loss, as a data point in a numbers game. ‘Fight every claim no matter the merits or they will all come knocking,’ is opposing council’s attitude more often than not.

In the face of all this, personal injury attorneys simply must have a fire in their bellies for justice and something in their DNA that drives them to help people. Otherwise, they would become casualties themselves.

And all this became clearly evident in the stories the attorneys told, about themselves, their clients, their cases. This was done with sensitivity and without coming close to violating any standards of conduct. Attorneys are, after all, people with feelings and emotions. And when clients sense your humanity, they will be drawn to you. Because they know that you care, and that you will fight for them, they will hire you.

Check out the site Wolfgram & Associates, and decide for yourself if feelings, emotions and stories are consistent with professional communication.

Remember your last trade show?

Think about your booth or poster presentation for a minute. Is it jam-packed with data? Now ask yourself, how many people out of ten that walk by are pausing by your display? How much time does it take to grasp your message? Does your display tell a story that people will remember? Can you use your display to engage people in conversation?

Click here to learn more, or call us at (314) 772-1185.

How well are you relating to your audience? Are you making it easy for them to see themselves working with you? If you throw data at people you are forcing them to search through information and make judgments about what may be relevant. So, for the data hounds among us, who is really telling your story; you or the viewer?

On the other hand if you show that you understand your audience by reflecting their immediate concerns in your display, they will want to talk to you. And isn’t that why you came to the show?

Click TellingYourStory.com to learn more.

Join us for "Coffee with the Experts" Wednesday, June 13th, 8:00am at the Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, Washington University. The panel of experts will include:

Rex Reed, Executive Director for Community Relations, the YouthBridge Association, www.youthbridgeassociation.org, addressing the structural needs of children’s charities by blending entrepreneurial thinking with the best business practices of successful social agencies

Dan Davison, Founder & CEO, BentonsEdge LLC, www.bentonsedge.com, sales and marketing for technology companies

Mary Kay Digby, Social Entrepreneurship Collaboration Coordinator, Skandalaris Center

If you would like to make a 10-minute appointment with the panel, to have some coffee and talk about your idea, contact Jane Yorker at yorker@wustl.edu or 314.935.9134. If you haven't already done so, you will be required to post a brief description of your idea to www.ideabounce.com prior to the Coffee.

Originally published June 7, 2007, as an e-mail sent from the BentonsEdge web site. Written by Dan Davison.

Stories Help Convert Free Beta Users to Paying Subscribers

Last week I met with the executives from a relatively new company that is offering a faster Internet service for PC gamers. Their immediate challenge is converting free beta trial-users into paying customers. A trial makes for a pretty good self-test of benefit. Users can prove it to themselves. But people can quickly become habituated to a higher level of service, and lose the emotional spark required to push them to action, to sign up and pay. Therefore you have to tell the Value-Story™ as well. Ironically, demonstrating value is not enough! You’ve probably seen the same thing yourself. So we are looking at ways to demonstrate value and simultaneously tell users about the benefits that they are getting. Let’s engage emotion and rational thought to get those beta-users to sign up and pay for that great service!

Small Stories Follow and Big Stories Lead

Stories with a small ‘s’ are the tradecraft by which you coax people into adopting or even “stealing” your ideas. In your role as a communicator, you must learn how to spot good stories, and what type of stories will work for your purposes. For example, inspirational stories generally fall into three genres:

• The Challenge Plot: David & Goliath
  


• The Connection Plot: Good Samaritan or Mean Joe Greene/Coke
  


• The Creative Plot/ mental breakthrough: That eureka moment like rigging Apollo 13 to save the astronauts, the apple falling on Newton’s head, or every episode of MacGyver
  

If you have selected relevant stories, then you are showing—rather than telling—how your ideas are relevant to your listener’s world. Yes, stories are anecdotal. And thus they have the power to coax listeners to fill in gaps and make connections from their world, to yours. Your job is to select the stores that reflect your core message, your agenda. You must tell the right story at the right time and tell it artfully. Your listener will do the rest.



Think of Stories with a big ‘S’ as the Big Story, the future that we all want, such as more resources and less work, a more prosperous, less uncertain future, a safe and sustainable environment. CEO’s, presidents, and leaders offer us a positive future, their vision…that is what makes them appear to us as leaders. But the best leaders show a path to the future with concrete steps and the other foregoing elements. In so doing they evoke emotion and move us to action. Big stories in and of themselves do not prompt people to take action. But big stories bolstered by lots of small ones, each built with the elements above, do move us to action.

Emotion: "Homeless. Will Work for Food" Works!

People are moved to action more by a single example—as in one sunburned, long-bearded guy at the exit ramp, or one poor up-gazing child—than by the statistics that describe an entire population. Just think about Al Gore’s approach when he ran for president against George Bush. Compare that to his approach selling the concept of Global Warming with his movie, Inconvenient Truth. In the movie, Gore sells a bleak vision. Though he uses statistics extensively, each instance is backed up by a story.

Sell against the pain

Gore moves us to action by showing us what we are losing. Remember, ‘loss’ is more real than ‘gain’ because I can see and touch the elements of my loss. When selling against pain, the communications challenge is much easier. We need only demonstrate significant risk to stir emotion. So seek out pain and risk, find sources of fear, and find headaches. There, you will find emotion. Use stories to show how you can eliminate pain, risk, fear and headaches. Your point of view becomes naturally attractive.

Selling to the pain helps you as the communicator. By focusing on the alleviation of pain, you are more likely to understand your listener’s self-interest. You are more likely to be relevant and you can borrow existing emotional power.

When you must sell the benefit

Future benefits are more abstract. Future benefits require people to envision something that they have never seen. And few benefits elicit an emotional response powerful enough to move people to action. For example, it is difficult to get people to forgo current spending (creates PAIN today) to save money for the future (may offer GAIN in the future).

But when you sell future benefits, use inspirational stories and legends. The schoolteacher retired rich by living modestly. Scrawny, poor kids Lance Armstrong and Jan Ullrich became world-wide cycling legends by always working harder than anyone else. Warren Buffett cites the Russian immigrant who built a $100 M furniture store chain on $500 cash and hard work.

People only feel for other people, not abstractions. So use stories about people. Relate your facts to people.

Credibility: Let them prove it to themselves

People don’t really buy into case studies. They are simply looking for a context into which they can plug their own particulars, then run through and test for themselves. So the best credibility is that which people create for themselves by asking and answering questions in the context of your story. For example, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Ronald Reagan, 1980. No matter the reality, most people answer that question in the negative. That lent credibility to Reagan’s position.

Sources of credibility:

• The best proof is that which the listener proves to himself (see Reagan example). Make claims that are easy for listeners to test, like “Where’s the Beef?!” They can go to any Wendy’s restaurant and look for themselves.
  

• “I saw it with my own eyes!” Provide opportunities for listeners to see, hear, touch, taste, and feel, for themselves. Want to sell corn? Feed them corn bread.
  

• Contrite or antiauthority: Cancer patient warning us not to smoke.
  

• Details lend credibility…he couldn’t have made up all those details, it must be true! But don’t make it complicated (SIMPLE) or attempt to clear up miscommunication by adding more detail (CONCRETE).
  

• When using facts and statistics, bring it to a human scale. For example, illustrate a big number with an equivalent amount of BB’s in can, and shake it. Rather than talking about billions in the world, talk about hundreds in my neighborhood.

• Involve your audience. Tell a scary story or an apt anecdote, no matter how statistically insignificant the occurrences. It will make your major point seem real.
  

• Using experts to lend credibility is less effective than you may think. Listeners often don’t understand what makes the person an expert. So the listener has to take your word for it that the person is an expert. And you’re no expert. Nobody cares what degrees people have. A human-scale story by a peer to your listener will convince the listener more than the insights from an expert.

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that...concrete

Your story must be relevant before it can be concrete. So keep in mind that the subject matter that you select should never be about you, but about your listener. Truly listen to your audience to find the ballpark in which they are playing. Identify a context that has meaning for them. This is not to say that you should respond to stake-holders point for point. Storytelling is more creative, more interesting than that. Do not react. Rather, elevate the conversation above the finger-pointing. Be relevant, not reactive. A good story leads listeners to generalize. When listeners generalize, they convince themselves of your point of view. But when you do it, you are simply not listening. Here are three points to keep in mind:

• Most business communications is hopelessly abstract. Bring everything to a human scale. Don’t concern yourself with telling the “whole story.” Nobody cares but you. Give a human-scale example to which people can relate, and from which they will generalize.

• Most of the time, concreteness boils down to specific people doing specific things. Use names, faces, places. Think like a newspaper reporter.
  Show. Don’t snow. That is, showing with a carefully chosen detail is more effective than snowing your listener with superfluous facts. Experts react to miscommunication by increasing elaborateness. Don’t do it!

• When you have to be abstract, use metaphors. For example, illustrate Global Warming or Climate Change with a globe sitting in a steam bath, or anthropomorphize the globe showing it with an ice pack on its head and a thermometer in its mouth. Turn a strategy into a game, or a capabilities presentation into cartoon characters doing things.