You’re working hard to establish your practice, to build a real presence in your community and you’re ready to add some effective marketing to help you reach your goals. But before you begin, let me recommend a few worthwhile steps to take on the front end, steps that will help assure success on the back end.

Its important to start with a strong legal marketing foundation, a solid infrastructure that will support your marketing efforts. This infrastructure should be aligned with your firm's goals & values. Now your business will project an authentic message and attract the type of referral sources and/or clients you are looking to work with. 

Here are a few of the most critical and often overlooked elements of a successful marketing foundation: Biography, Elevator Speech, Ideal Client and Mission Statement.

Setting up an LLC can, of course, offer many advantages. Chief among those advantages is an LLC’s flexibility. With less stringent requirements for compliance and less necessary paperwork than S-Corps and C-Corps, LLCs are easier to form and easier to keep in good legal standing.

The flexibility of an LLC, however, is not permission to be informal in its creation or operation. Consider the recent case before the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, Robl Construction, Inc. v. Homoly.

A coherent strategy for the transfer of assets is, of course, crucial to the success of any estate plan. But our best-laid plans will fall far short of expectations if the trusts we’ve so carefully drafted are never properly funded.

If the trust is the car, the funding is the fuel. Without gas in the tank, that beautiful sedan with the precision engine is just metal on four wheels. It’s not going anywhere. The same holds true for an estate plan. Until it’s properly funded, the “plan” is just a plan – a plan that can’t be executed. Like the car with the needle on empty, it’s not going to take you anywhere.