Book Reviews
This Month's Featured Selections
Marketing Success Stories: Personal Interviews With 66
Rainmakers
By Hollis Hatfield Weishar (Chicago, IL: ABA Law Practice
Management Section, 1997). Soft. 272 pgs. Retail: $89.95.
Reviewed by Charles Labanowsky
Sales people, in any line of business, tell us that marketing is
learned and not taught. We can all think of many attorneys who seem to
have a native instinct for rainmaking, those who are naturally and
almost genetically inclined to attracting new clients, and maintaining
their existing client base.
In Marketing Success Stories author Hollis Hatfield Weishar
has collected epilogues from 66 lawyers from around the country, from
small firms to large firms. Weishar is a marketing consultant who began
in 1986 in Kansas City, Mo., as a consultant to a 65-member
architectural firm, having since consulted with some of the larger
accounting and legal firms in Missouri, Arizona and New Mexico. She now
consults with a 120-lawyer regional New England law firm in Boston.
The author suggests that marketing of legal services is not a
"cookbook activity" whereby one merely follows a recipe written by
someone else, but it is a set of activities that "uniquely reflects the
individual lawyer." Each of the success stories in the book follows that
description, as each is told by one who has successfully practiced a
given set of activities or techniques during his or her legal career.
One author presents a detailed checklist of daily and weekly marketing
activities, suggesting that "enjoying what you do is probably the best
marketing tool anyone could ever present to a client." While one author
lists his 10 commandments of client service, several others espouse
philosophies of client treatment that have made them successful over the
years.
Many of the concepts, such as networking, innovation, building
relationships, and community visibility are obvious to most of us
practicing the law; other activities and techniques in Weishar's book
are more subtle, effortlessly performed by the more successful and
experienced lawyers. For lawyers just starting out in practice or
recently assigned the responsibility of recruiting new clients, this
book is especially useful as it lays out a menu of various marketing
techniques and describes their use in great detail.
The book is divided into five sections: Building Relationships,
Developing a Marketing Program, Niche Marketing, Client Service, and
Referrals. Although the book can be read straight through like a good
novel, no story is more than a few pages long, so it can be read like a
book of poetry or inspirational text. It also can be retained as a
future reference book for those who are continuing to grow their
practices and those who are looking to enhance their attorney-client
relationships.
The Verdict of History on Sacco and Vanzetti
By Frank M. D'Alessandro (New York, NY: Jay Street Publishers,
1997). Soft. 425 pgs. Retail: $15.95.
Reviewed by Mark A. Erlandson
The Sacco-Vanzetti robbery and murder trial that resulted in the
execution of two Italian immigrants was a cause celebré in the
1920s. In terms of public notoriety and the alleged exposure of a flawed
legal system, it can be seen as a harbinger of the O.J. Simpson and New
York au pair trials. Also involving contemporary themes of
anti-immigrant prejudice and Timothy McVeigh-like radicalism, the case
would seem ripe for fascinating analysis and reflection. Unfortunately,
you won't get that in Dr. Frank D'Alessandro's The Verdict of History on
Sacco and Vanzetti.
First, the author could not decide whether the book was to be an
entertaining narrative or a scholarly work. Ultimately, it is neither.
D'Alessandro never humanizes the doomed men and their story nor does he
present a rational, spirited defense of their innocence.
The book could hardly be considered a definitive reference work. It
contains no footnotes nor bibliography. Quotes typically are given
without attribution, and the photographs have no captions. Thus, a
critical reader will be utterly unconvinced of the book's argument that
Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.
Another criticism is the book's readability. Perhaps every
grammatical mistake possible is made in each chapter, including
inconsistent tense, sentence fragments, inconsistent use of quotation
marks, and typographical errors. Not only do these distract the reader
but ultimately they contribute to destroy any credibility D'Alessandro
may have remaining.
In fact, parts of the book are almost bizarre, as when the author
gives a rather paranoid response to other books that have concluded the
Italian immigrants to be guilty; or where he writes, "Being a wop has
never been easy and some things will never change." It is obvious that
the Sacco-Vanzetti case has become a crusade for D'Alessandro.
Unfortunately, personal crusades can make for poor scholarship and even
worse reading.
Reverse Mortgages: A Lawyer's Guide to
Housing & Income Alternatives
Edited by David A. Bridewell & Charles Nauts (Chicago, IL:
ABA Senior Lawyers Division, 1997). Soft. 291 pgs. Retail:
$79.95.
Reviewed by Michael P. Ash
Twenty-one percent of America's population will be 65 or older by the
year 2030, up from 13 percent in the year 2000. That demographic trend
has created large growth sectors in real estate, heath care, and related
fields. It also provides a myriad of opportunities for lawyers advising
an aging population.
One issue facing our aging population is lifestyle choice as people
age, and paying for it. Much of that population's wealth is tied up in
their homes. Given people's desire to stay in their homes as long as
possible, transferring wealth from the home (an "illiquid, nonincome
producing asset") to liquid assets allowing seniors to stay in their
homes and enjoy a fulfilling lifestyle is critical - hatching the nest
egg they worked so hard to build.
Reverse Mortgages: A Lawyer's Guide to Housing and Income
Alternatives provides an excellent overview of legal and financial
issues for lawyers to consider when advising clients. Reverse
Mortgages compiles materials from a variety of sources and its
authors represent a variety of disciplines.
Part I examines various forms of reverse mortgages, their pros and
cons, and discusses financial examples, stressing the lawyer's role as a
counselor. Reverse mortgages also are compared to sale-leasebacks,
trusts, and other mechanisms that allow an owner to stay in the home.
Part I contains checklists and appendices including forms, handbooks,
and financial models.
Part II focuses on reviewing congregate care facilities. Starting
with a practical checklist of things to look for in evaluating nursing
homes, it moves on to sample documents, model acts, and consumer
guides.
Although Reverse Mortgages may not answer all questions
(particularly answers specific to Wisconsin), it functions well as a
guide to "senior-housing issues for lawyers, their senior clients, and
the savings bank, insurance companies, and other financial
institutions."
Eckhardt's Workbook for Wisconsin Estate Planners
By Mark J. Bradley, George A. Dionisopoulos, Thomas J. Drought,
John C. Frank, Mary M. Hogue, John A. Kussmaul, Richard J. Langer,
Judith G. McMullen, Sally C. Merrell, Randy S. Nelson, J. Lewis Perlson,
Carl J. Rasmussen, Linda Roberson, Robert Conrad Severson, and Paul J.
Tilleman (Madison, WI: State Bar CLE Books, 1997). 735+ pgs. Retail:
$185. Includes forms on disk. To order, call (608) 257-3838, or order online.
Reviewed by Richard Berkley
I am not a "specialist" in estate planning. Consequently, I was
particularly impressed by the thoroughness of the 1997 edition of the
Eckhardt's Workbook for
Wisconsin Estate Planners. Although it is difficult to design a
practical aid that is useful to all levels of experience, the
Workbook seems to have achieved that goal. The key is the
Workbook's organization. The first two chapters provide a basic
introduction to estate planning issues and a guided step-by-step tour
through the many stages of the estate planning representation. The nine
other chapters of the Workbook focus on covering in-depth
estate planning issues and on presenting the relevant case law or
statutory citations.
Besides its chapter organization, the Workbook has four
specific well-planned features that assist the user. The table of
contents provides a quick and accurate method of finding a specific
subject and its sub-issues. The comprehensive and compact index is
organized by subject. The table of cases, statutes, rules, and
regulations at the end of the book provides another quick access to a
specific issue. Finally, there are several checklists throughout the
book that assist browsing within a particular topic area.
A final useful aspect of the Workbook's organization is the
plethora of included sample forms. These samples, generally, explain
graphically how careful drafting can transform issues highlighted in the
text into final documents. This process is simplified by three useful
features. First, in a manner common to forms books, the text provides
alternative language appropriate to several different iterations of the
fact pattern that a client may present. Second, the forms are annotated
in a way that highlights how they may be adapted to fit a given client's
unique circumstances. Third, the Workbook comes with a handy
forms disk that includes, in WordPerfect or ASCII text format, all the
forms presented in the book.
The forms disk is easily installed from within Windows or from the
DOS prompt. It installs the forms into a directory entitled "estplan,"
which practitioners may place anywhere upon their computers' hard disk.
The online forms have DOS-style filenames that replicate the positioning
of the forms within the Workbook. For example, "09_116.frm" is
the "Opt Out Marital Property Agreement" form located in section 9.116
of the Workbook. The online forms also include
fill-in-the-blank areas that are underlined, as are the optional and
alternative provisions (these are underlined in the book).
In conclusion, there is no reason why trust and estate lawyers could
not handle their practice without buying this book. On the other hand,
this book and its accompanying forms disk will greatly simplify the
process of serving one's clients and of getting the law right. For a
sole practitioner just starting in an estate planning practice, I think
this book would pay for itself very quickly.
Wisconsin
Lawyer
