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In addition to the above states, we have local Bar campaigns active for 2012 in Florida, California, the Carolinas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and now New York. We hope to expand more formal State Chapters this year to reach a 'critical mass' that will sustain the costs of similar local outreach efforts on behalf of members. This number varies state-by-state, dependent on several factors including whether ADR is widely-enough embraced in a given state, the relative cost of local Bar advertising, etc. Interested members can contact me to discuss directly by email.
PODCAST
SPONSORSHIP We've also become the sponsor of Georgia Academy member G. Michael Smith's new podcast, MediationMatters.blog.com, which features topics and discussions of interest geared to legal professionals and the public alike. We're looking into similar sponsorships in the coming weeks, though our focus remains on attracting litigators! Finally, we're confirmed as a Sponsor of the Awards Dinner for the DRI (Defense Research Institute) later this year and we will be attending that Annual Meeting as a prominent exhibitor in October (around 1500 defense attorneys from around the US in attendance!) |
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| Rose-Anne Raies setting up our exhibition table | The website was shown off to all attendees! |
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| More attendees dropping by for literature and a demo! | Rose-Anne had 10 minutes to present
the website to all attendees (Grainy video still!) |
The NALA Conference is attended by more than 400 senior paralegals from more than 30 state chapters of the association and we have a captive audience for a presentation to attendees at the top of the conference on Thursday July 28. Although not often the 'decision makers', paralegals are an important target group for us, as we've seen from our Florida and other longer-established chapters that these are the individuals who are often the gatekeepers as far as scheduling the various attending parties - thus, they're the ones who tend to find the calendaring function most useful. If all goes to plan, all of these attendees will return to their firms around the US, armed with literature and a firm understanding of the calibre of our member database!
We will be preparing for our annual conference over the next week or two, so
watch out for photos and media from that event next month!
JUNE 2011
NATIONAL PRESS
COVERAGE - CORPORATE COUNSEL MAGAZINE/WEB
Our outreach to ACC members and in-house counsel the last few weeks' has
caused quite the buzz, resulting in a call this month from the Senior Editor
at Corporate Counsel magazine, published by ALM (who own the Law.com online
portals). The profile on the Academy is entitled "Taking Sides: The National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals' New Approach to ADR",
written by journalist Dan Kaplan. It does a TERRIFIC job of highlighting the
calibre of our membership and gives the reader plenty of reasons to refer to
our online roster to find a suitably qualified/experienced neutral. The
article can be read online at http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202498204838
The same piece should be in print editions of the publication later in the
summer and we are seeking to ensure that the regional ALM publications that
we already work with (San Francisco Recorder; Georgia's Daily Report; The
Texas Lawyer) also pick up this article for their local markets shortly.
STATE CHAPTERS IN
PROGRESS
We are making inroads into finding suitably qualified/experienced neutrals
in several new states:
ALASKA - We currently have no members. There appear to be just 3 "full time" neutrals in the entire state, so there will no formal Exec. Committee formed for this small state. We're hopeful that at least one of those will meet the formal requirements for NADN (likely for arbitration) and we thus hope to be able to turn this state to the light blue color on our Directory map page!
ARKANSAS - We are pleased to have 3 of the very best neutrals in the state already named as charter members. Our research in recent weeks has suggested 4 other attorneys/judges who would appear to comfortably meet the criteria, each of whom also has the required votes from existing members. Pending due diligence, we may then see a maximum total of 7 top-tier neutrals in this state.
ARIZONA - Research still pending, but we now have sifted through the list of over 300 'registered' ADR attorneys in the state and sought advice from the AZ Committee members: Amy Lieberman, Shawn Aiken and Bruce Meyerson. It is unlikely there are more than another dozen attorneys who will make the cut - we'll report back once investigations complete.
COLORADO - Again, research still underway - we're optimistic though of seeing as many as 15 very qualified, full-time neutrals added to this state chapter in the coming weeks.
NEW YORK - Litigation atty. research has now been completed across more than 200 individual firms across NY - we have whittled the 500+ known ADR practitioners down to around 100 that were referenced at least twice by different firms. We will be finalizing our 4 Executive Committee members this month and will then move forward with the peer nomination procedure to vet the 100 'name checked' neutrals down to those known to the committee members and believed to be of sufficient reputation. Best guess just now would be perhaps no more than 50 neutrals making the cut for the formal NY Chapter.
MAY 2011
NATIONAL
ASSOCIATION OF LEGAL ASSISTANTS - SPONSORSHIP
We are confirmed as the major sponsor for the 2011 Annual Conference of the
National Assoc. of Legal Assistants (NALA),
being held in Dallas, TX July 28-30. This event is attended by more
than 400 senior paralegals from more than 40 state chapters of the
association and we have a captive audience for a presentation to attendees
at the top of the conference. The brochure for this event has gone out this
month by mail to over 18,000 members and features a newly designed ad
promoting our NADN.org website on the inside cover (SEE PDF)
NEW YORK STATE
CHAPTER
We are putting together an Executive Committee over the next month for a
formal NY State Chapter. We've already compiled a list of all known civil
mediators and arbitrators in that state (around 400 names) and we'll now be
surveying leading trial attorneys over the next few weeks to generate a
picture of who the most in-demand neutrals are - with the help and guidance
of the committee, we'll narrow that list down to only those attorneys who
prove to meet the Academy's criteria and hope to have the NY chapter
launched officially by August.
We are also just now reaching out to some of the few 'ADR superstars' in Alaska, Arkansas and Colorado and hope to have a few more members inducted in those states within the next month.
ASSOC OF CORPORATE COUNSEL / Lexology News Service
Letters and NADN
booklets have gone out to around 1400 known members of the ACC in Texas, Florida,
Georgia and North Carolina. We've also had recent talks with the publishers
of the Lexology email
service, which is the industry's leading email news wire service for
corporate counsel, based out of London. I will be meeting with the publisher
in London (likely following our conference in August) to discuss the possibility of
working together in some capacity.
APRIL 2011
ALABAMA
CHAPTER LAUNCHES
We're pleased to announce the launch of our new Alabama Chapter, see
PDF PRESS
RELEASE. As one of the smaller states, there are just 20 attorneys and judges in Alabama who were found to meet the high standards for Academy membership, but it's a definite case of quality over quantity, with most all of that state's
most trusted neutrals now on board, all publishing calendars for firms. The Alabama Chapter does not have it's own separate website
(like FloridaMediators.org for example) but can be visited online directly at
www.nadn.org/alabama.
This state chapter format website works for all states now - over time, this
will increase our online footprint with sites like Google.
ASSOC OF CORPORATE COUNSEL -
MailOut
By the end of this month, we'll have sent out letters and NADN
booklets to around 1400 known members of the ACC in Texas, Florida,
Georgia and North Carolina. We will be recommending counsel to use the NADN
website to search for a suitably qualified mediator or arbitrator, should
they have pre-suit diputes. We're concentrating on just those states where
we have an existing state chapter presence for now - we'll monitor the
response (online and offline) to this outreach in May, and then likely plan
to do a larger mailout to all 10,000+ ACC members later this year.
PERSONAL NOTE: I'm off on a "royal" trip back to England April 21st, back around May 4th! I'll be checking email
at least daily but should you require an immediate response, please call Member Coordinator Rose-Anne Raies directly at (813) 600-3678.
MARCH 2011
2011 NADN MEDIATION TRAINING RETREAT - August 11-13th, Ritz Carlton, Amelia
Island, FL
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 Download PDF |
THANKS to the members that have already
returned their registration forms for our August Training weekend,
Rose-Anne and I look forward to meeting many of you for the first
time!
We still have a reserved block of 6 or so room, so any members that find they might be available to attend nearer the time can let us know, but these remain 'first come first served' so the sooner the better.
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FEBRUARY 2011
2011 NADN MEDIATION TRAINING RETREAT - August 11-13th, Ritz Carlton, Amelia
Island, FL
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Download PDF |
We've set the date and the line up for our
2011 Members' Retreat - we're headed to Amelia Island, not too far
from Jacksonville, FL. Our guest faculty will once again include
Lee Jay Berman and Doug Noll from California's American Institute of
Mediation, presenting a new course, "Micro-Interventions in
Mediation" on the Friday and a continuation of their
well-received workshop from last year, "The Master Mediator -
Part II".
I've also invited Academy Member Don Philbin from San Antonio, TX to give his "Deal Or No Deal" presentation, which I think all our members will find particularly interesting, with a live demonstration of a final version of Don's new visualization software. All this of course at one of Florida's finest 5-star resorts - the
Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island! |
JANUARY 2011
NADN BOOKLET
FOR MAIL CAMPAIGNS & EVENT SPONSORSHIPS
We now have over 10,000 copies printed of a small booklet
introducing firms to the National Academy website! Rose-Anne will mail a
personal copy of this out to you before the end of February.
As mentioned in December, we have purchased the member mailing list for the Association of Legal Administrators (ALA), a key target group of office managers and paralegals and will be bulk mailing
1500+ personalized letters and booklets out to these influential contacts in February. Similar mailouts will be scheduled for later
this year to groups including corporate counsel, trial lawyer rosters and
the National Assoc. of Legal Assistants.
CROSS-PROMOTION WITH ALL
LOCAL CHAPTER ADS
In those states where we have separate state chapter
associations (Florida, California, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee
and Texas to date) the members fund direct Bar advertising to promote
themselves through local Bar publications, etc. All of these 2011 ad
campaigns now include mention of the National Academy, encouraging firms to
refer to the parent National roster should they require an excellent neutral
from out of state. This should greatly raise awareness of the NADN amongst
those firms that have already come to trust the calibre of the local
rosters.
SEARCH ENGINE / KEYWORD
IMPROVEMENTS
As I've mentioned before, we'd rather see 100 relevant law
firms visit the server in a day than 10,000 members of the public, thus
being at #1 in Google is not our key concern. The VAST majority of people
searching for local "mediators" or "arbitrators" online
are looking for a help with a divorce or family case and there are plenty of
websites (Mediate.com, Martindale Hubbell, Law.com etc) that can have that
traffic - this just isn't our demographic. On the state chapter websites in
Florida, Califoria etc, more than 80% of traffic comes from firms that
previously bookmarked the site, and we aim to push NADN.org to the same
level of usage nationally.
That said, we're working to make sure that NADN.org is easily found against the most relevant keywords, particularly those that specify that the user is searching for our particular civil/commercial neutrals...
1) We have loaded many of the site's pages with relevant keywords and
content so that we should eventually float nearer the top of the ratings for
the most valuable keyword searches, including searches for local state
keywords (eg; "florida mediators", "texas arbitrators",
etc). This takes time to achieve as Google is notoriously slow to
recognize/reward newer websites.
2) One of the ways that Google ranks the importance of websites is how many
'backlinks' connect to them. For this reason, we have a very vanilla but
useful roster page website, www.ADRConnect.com
, which exists purely to boost link traffic to our main NADN.org site. This
has already resulted in many members finding their names easily in Google
searches with keywords such as "firstname lastname mediator" for
example.
3) We have a pay-per-click GoogleAd campaign running in most states, which ensures a search for the most valuable keywords will pull NADN up as one of the top sponsored sites.
DECEMBER 2010
2011 NADN
Conference - Details Coming Soon
We hope to have the location/venue and speaker details announced
early in January for the NADN conference, talks already underway amongst
committee members. Watch this space in January!
BREAKING NEWS - NADN THE
MAJOR SPONSOR FOR NALA ANNUAL CONVENTION
We have just signed an agreement with the National Association of
Legal Assistants (www.NALA.org)
to be THE major sponsor for their national convention in Dallas, TX in July
2011. NALA is the largest association of paralegals in the nation, with more
than 25,000 members, and we will be partnering with this association to
disseminate materials to as many of these members as possible about our
roster and this time-saving database in particular. More details to come
early next year...
NEW NADN
BOOKLET/ROSTER CARD MATERIALS
Following a successful response rate to a direct mail campaign to
local trial lawyers for our Georgia Chapter, we are having new materials
printed up that will be used in similar national campaigns next year, hopefully
with groups such as the ACC (corporate counsel) and the AAJ (trial lawyers).
We hope to have these designs viewable online next month and more details as
to costs and budgets.
NOVEMBER 2010
Direct
Marketing Databases
We have been reaching out to several groups with a view to doing
some direct mail campaigns for early 2011. One of the most promising of
these is the Association of Legal Administrators (ALA), which has
around 10,000 members throughout the US. These members are typically in an
'office manager' position, working with both partners and paralegals and
thus are perfectly positioned to help disseminate information about NADN to
the relevant staff. We are purchasing their mailing list for a letter/info
pack campaign to begin in mid-January, going out in the North-East
We also this month attained an excellent database of some 8000+ Trial Attorneys across all 50 states, which we'll be using to promote the NADN.org roster far and wide via email and fax in the run up to the holidays. This should certainly raise awareness in those states in which we don't have distinct state chapters just now, including the North-East, Mid-West etc.
Texas
Chapter Website Launches at www.TexasNeutrals.org
Better late than never - the Texas Academy website is now live
and being promoted throughout the region via the local committee members.
NADN
LinkedIn Discussion Group
As per last month's update below, many members are now taking part in
discussions at the NADN's LinkedIn group, so if you have not yet joined that
please consider doing so, I will resend invitation emails in the first week
of December. This also adds the Academy logo to your LinkedIn profile as
well, which looks jolly nice and is good PR too!
OCTOBER 2010
Texas Chapter coming online
in November...
We are pleased to announce the imminent launch of our new Texas
Chapter, formed with the help of the founding committee of Will Pryor
(Dallas), Gary McGowan (Houston), Don Philbin (San Antonio) and Karl Bayer
(Austin). The charter list of around 50 attorneys and judges is a quite
definitive who's who of that state's leading ADR practitioners and these
Texas neutrals will be inducted into the NADN database in mid-November.
The new local website is still in beta-test for now but will come online at www.TexasNeutrals.org
Nov 15th (we hope!)
Blackberry
App - View/Edit your calendar on the road!
We have created a downloadable app for members who are addicted
to Blackberry phones. Many members have already begun to use this in Florida
and elsewhere (particularly those without a fulltime assistant back at the
office), and so you're welcome to download and install this...
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On your Blackberry's web browser visit http://www.nadn.org/bb/nadncalendar.jad |
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Confirm that you wish to DOWNLOAD this new application |
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Once loaded, you will find the blue NADN CALENDAR icon in your Downloads folder |
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To log into your account, simple enter your usual email/password combo (select Remember) |
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Touchcsreen BB's allow you to touch the dates to select them, otherwise use cursor pad to navigate |
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Once date(s) selected, just change to your preferred new status using the 4 options at the bottom. |
Members with iPhones/DROID/Palm Pre smartphones can already access their calendars via our MobileAdmin optimized web links - if you don't yet have your private URL for remote access via these phones, please email!
NADN
LinkedIn Discussion Group
I emailed everyone an invitation earlier this month to join the National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Group on LinkedIn. Obviously you have to have a
LinkedIn profile to join (but if you're not already, you probably should be - it's really become the "FaceBook for Professionals" and over
75% of our members are on there!) The new members-only discussion group allows members from across the USA to share experiences, war stories and advice.
Just visit THIS LINK to join the NADN Group and the ongoing discussion if you haven't already confirmed.
SEPTEMBER 2010
Press Release
Our press release (PDF)
was circulated through BusinessWire on September 1st, and has already
resulted in a number of mentions across legal publications: FL Bar News, NC
Lawyers Weekly, Lexology E-Bulletin, with pieces pending in Georgia's Daily
Report and the Daily Report. A number of ADR/Mediation blogs also picked up
on it, though this really isn't useful for our purposes as we're keen to
reach the potential clients, not those mediators and arbitrators that would
feel slighted at not being invited to membership(!) We received interest
from the editorial staff at LTN, a major Legal Technology blog/magazine, so
we're hopeful that they might run a feature in the October edition. The
press release also served to create many more 'backlinks' in the search
engines to our website, which will nudge us upwards in the search rankings
over the coming months.
Cross
Promotion with our Local Chapters
Our local chapter websites (Florida, California, North Carolina, Georgia,
Tennesse, Texas) have all now been updated to cross promote firms over to
this National site, with prominent animated web banners on all content
pages. In addition, we are about half way through contacting ALL known firm
staff that have utilized the local chapter websites (about 14,000
individuals!) and we're inviting them to instead utilize the NADN
website, particularly if they have the need for a neutral outside of their
local area. This has already led to an excellent bump in traffic, from 60
daily sessions average in August up to 400+ individual visitors per day
since the email blast to Florida area firms was sent on September
7th.
Finally, the local chapters all have member-funded ad campaigns running with local legal publications and all of these ads have now been edited to make mention of the NADN association and website, hopefully raising awareness of our National group and driving relevant attorney traffic our way.
WEBSITE UPDATE - PLEASE
REVIEW!
Have you updated your EXPERIENCE form lately (see above button)?
At the start of September we added in more than a dozen NEW DISPUTE AREAS, which we would urge you to check off if you have settled such cases in the past. These include some head-slapping "How The Hell Did We Forget" areas such as "Professional Malpractice" and "Class Actions" as well as a few that are specific to certain industries (Software, Mining, etc.)
PLEASE MAKE SURE TO DO A QUICK REVIEW OF THESE NEW DISPUTE FIELDS ASAP!
PLUS - Blackberry Users - Volunteers Needed!
Our software for the iPhone and Android phones seems to work just fine, with more than
80 members now able to log in to edit their calendar schedules from these
smartphones. However, the Blackberry version still needs work - we should have a new version of a BlackBerry app working by October so if any members (with calendars active) want to volunteer to help beta-test, kindly drop me an email!
AUGUST 2010
NADN Annual Seminar, Aug 5-7
2010 - A Resounding Success!
It was a pleasure to finally meet many of the charter members from
Florida, Georgia, California, North Carolina and Tennessee in person
down in Orlando earlier this month, along with a handful of new National
Academy members. The event was well attended (particularly for these
troubled economic times) and the feedback from attendees was extremely
positive. My thanks to the invited trainers, particularly Lee Jay Berman,
for putting on an exciting look at some of the latest techniques that
members can apply to their own ADR practices!
Photos from the event can be seen online now at our Annual Seminar page - click
here to visit! We'll likely shift the event next year to a different
date and venue, yet to be decided - I do hope that we might meet in person
then!
Charter Member Outreach Complete
We have called a halt to the fast-track outreach to already
established ADR practitioners who are members of the IAM, ACCTM or College
of Commercial Arbitrators, now that we have a handful of members on the
ground in 36 of the 50 states. We inducted around 70 new members through
this process, the vast majority of whom are fulltime practitioners who very
comfortably exceed the NADN criteria. Future members will have to
submit to the longer form application, requiring them to provide the names
of attorneys for whom they have mediated or arbitrated within the preceding
90 days, etc.
Texas Chapter - In Progress
During the August seminar, I had the pleasure of meeting with 2 of
our 4 Texas Exec.Committee members, Gary McGowan (Houston) and Don Philbin
(San Antonio) to discuss the new Texas Chapter. In conjunction with Karl
Bayer (Austin) and Will Pryor (Dallas) we are close to completing the final
nominees list and we hope to begin the outreach to these attorneys by early
September.
Marketing & PR Update
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We're just this week working on a 400-word press release to be sent out through the BusinessWire distribution network in the first week of September (bad time to do it in August!). This will submit news of the NADN.org site launch throughout North America, and we'll hopefully thus see some news coverage in legal publications and blogs. DRAFT RELEASE VIEWABLE HERE (PDF)
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We have email blasts ready to go out to more than 20,000 contacts that have previously used our state association sites (FL, CA, NC, GA, TN). These personalized emails will inform these attorneys/paralegals/adjusters that they're better off using the NADN.org site for expediency from now on. The search tools on the NADN.org site are in fact quicker/better than the local ones, with the advantage of being able to search by date more efficiently than the old sites, so I'm hopeful we can get many firms to bookmark NADN instead.
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The slow but sure work is continuing to drive search engine traffic to NADN.org site. As of Aug 11, Google has now picked up the homepage and a few content pages and a search for NADN finds us at #1, but it will be a few more weeks at least before ADR practice /member bio keywords result in significant traffic. We've just this month placed animated banners on ALL the local chapter websites, pointing to the NADN.org homepage - this will result in Google/Bing raising the 'Page Rank' of NADN.org within another month or two.
JULY 2010
NADN.org GOES
"LIVE" on July 19 2010
We have been pleased to welcome more than 60 new charter members
from across the nation, all of whom are amongst the best established ADR
practitioners in their states (welcome to the many members of the ACCTM, IAM
and CCA groups). Now that we have more than 500 attorneys named as
charter members of the NADN, we will revert to our more formal
voting/nomination vetting procedures, including attorney reference
interviews, to induct any further neutrals. (Log out and see 'About' pages
for formal requirements)
Now that our Directory map page has 40 of the 50 states in play, we've gone live and have submitted our "site map" to Google, Bing and the other major search engines. It will likely though be a period of at least 4-6 weeks before any significant traffic comes in from relevant keyword searches, which gives us time to tweak content and get all members set up with their log ins, calendar installations and firm website edits.
Reminder: If YOU would like to have your live calendar displayed over at your personal/firm website, please just call or email and we can help you make that edit; it's actually a very easy edit and your regular clients (and staff) will greatly benefit from the time savings involved in seeing dates online in this way.
Texas Chapter In Progress
As the state of Texas has one of the largest ADR
communities in the nation, we are working with a newly finalized steering
committee to identify a list of the best established ADR attorneys for that
state. We hope to have the 'Texas Academy of Distinguished Neutrals' chapter
finalized and active before the end of 2010, with perhaps around 50
attorneys confirmed. (In many of the smaller states, the local market and
our strict experience/practice requirements will generally not allow more
than a handful of qualified neutrals to be invited to join.)
Press &
Marketing
More to come on this in August, once we've had a chance to
brain-storm with committee members at the conference. We do intend to hold
off sending out press release through the wire agencies until September
though; this gives Google and the engines time to pick up our site. The dog
days of summer are not the best time to seek press, though rest assured,
we'll be making plenty of noise online and to our already established press
contacts.
Annual Adv. Training Retreat - Aug 5-7th, Orlando, FL
We have over 65 attendees confirmed for the inaugural Retreat
event in Orlando, including a few of our very newest NADN members. I
look forward to meeting many of you there in person in just 2 weeks time!
JUNE 2010
LAUNCH DATE SET FOR EARLY JULY 2010
Our NADN website is set to go live within the next month, after
several weeks of successful beta testing! We will be tweaking content and
keywords of the website after that, to ensure that the NADN site is widely
linked to and it should quickly rise up through the Google ranking system to
generate relevant keyword traffic. We're also working to identify the foremost practitioners on
the ground in those states where we currently have no local members at all.
