Business clients don't go looking for a lawyer until something happens: a contract, a dispute, a hire, a deal. Outbound puts your firm in front of general counsel and founders with a specific, timely reason, so you're the call they make when it does.
Hi Marcus,
Halden registered a Colorado entity in June and there are four Denver engineering roles on the careers page this month. Colorado's Equal Pay for Equal Work Act requires a pay range and a benefits summary in every posting, and the postings I saw do not have them.
We have a two-page checklist covering that, FAMLI registration and the notice requirements for a first Colorado hire. Happy to send it over, no strings.
If it would help to talk it through, I can do twenty minutes this week or next.
[Your name]
Law firms win work through reputation, referrals from other lawyers and the client who followed a partner from the last firm. That book of business is real, and it is also finite: it grows at the rate the partners can attend bar events and lunches, and it is tied to a few individuals who will one day retire or lateral out. The associates who are supposed to build the next book are billing 1,900 hours and have never made a business call in their lives.
When a firm tries outbound itself, the marketing coordinator sends a newsletter about the new practice group and the partners refuse to sign anything that sounds like selling, so nothing goes out that a general counsel would answer. The bar rules on solicitation make everyone nervous and the draft dies. Run properly, the email reads like a note between counsel: it names the new subsidiary or the first hires in a new state, points to the obligation that just attached and offers something useful before it offers a meeting.
Lawyers can't sound like salespeople, and their emails can't either. We write short, factual notes that offer something useful first, and we keep every claim inside what the firm is comfortable saying publicly.
We start from the event, not the company. New subsidiaries in Secretary of State filings, acquisitions in the trade press, multi-state hiring on careers pages, funding rounds, a rule change that touches one sector. We take the general counsel where there is one and the CEO, CFO or HR director where there is not, and we run the list against your conflicts database before anything is sent.
Our copywriters read what a partner would read before a first meeting: the 8-K or press release behind the deal, the job postings that show which states the company now employs in, the docket for anything already filed (which we then avoid), and the trade press in that sector. We are looking for the obligation that has just attached and nobody at the company seems to own yet.
A lawyer's email cannot sound like a salesperson's, and it cannot make claims the state bar would object to, so ours make none. They name the event, state the obligation, offer a checklist or a short memo the firm already has, and ask for a call. No 'leading', no 'award-winning', no results from prior matters, no adjectives about the firm. The signing partner approves every draft.
General counsel read email early, so we send between 7 and 9am in the prospect's time zone, Tuesday to Thursday, and we hold sends in the last two weeks of December and around fiscal year-end. Emails go from dedicated domains we warm for three to four weeks, never the firm's own, and two follow-ups add a second point rather than repeating the first. The sequence stops on reply.
A reply from a general counsel is usually one line: send me the memo, or who at your firm handles this. Replies land in the portal sorted into interested, not now and out of office, and we flag any that mention an existing matter so you can run conflicts first. The partner answers that day. Every two weeks we rebalance the list towards the events and practice areas drawing replies.
It uses two public records, the entity registration and the job postings, and points to a specific statute the company is visibly not complying with, which a general counsel can verify in two minutes. The offer is a checklist, not a pitch, so replying costs nothing. It leaves out the firm's rankings, its client list and any fee talk, all of which would make it read as marketing.
Written communication to a business prospect is permitted under the ABA Model Rules and most state equivalents, with conditions: no false or misleading claims, no coercion, and in some states a labelling or record-keeping requirement. We keep every claim factual, we keep copies of every send, and your signing partner approves the copy before it goes out. Check your own state's rule; we will work within it.
They delete the emails that open with the firm's ranking and read the ones that tell them something about their own company they had not seen yet. An email that names the new entity, the statute it triggered and offers a checklist is the second kind. The reader is judging whether you would be useful in a real matter, and the email is the sample.
You give us your client list and conflicts export before the first send and we exclude those domains permanently. Our copywriters also check the docket for any prospect and never write about a matter that has already been filed. If a reply mentions an existing dispute, we flag it in the portal so you can run a formal conflicts check before anyone responds.