“New Client Inquiry on Line One”  is my column for the Oklahoma Bar Journal this month.

There’s a lot of discussion about attorney marketing and client development. Many firms now market via some form of social media.

But sometimes the procedure relating to what happens with the telephone calls (and other inquiries) from potential clients hasn’t been reviewed in quite a while. It is important to properly prioritize and handle these inquiries no matter what the compensation system of the law firm. But if your law firm bases any part of compensation on originations of new matters, opening new client files or any metric that penalizes lawyers without enough work to do, everyone needs to understand just how incoming calls from new clients are handled. This column also suggests that it’s probably time to do some inital training or a refresher course for your staff on just how urgent these calls are.

Or maybe you can just let things rock along the way they are. Because that lawyer who was always buying the extra desserts at lunch and taking them back to the receptionist may be the smartest marketer in the law firm!