Forgive me for the sales pitch but please understand I’m not pitching for bar associations, I’m pitching for the specific benefits YOU can get from a couple of local bar associations. On the general topic of leveraging a bar association membership, let me direct you to Ten Tips For Making Your Bar Association Dues Work For You & Leverage Your Bar Membership for Marketing.
But more specific for you Illinois/Chicagoland folks, some timely “specials” from the Bar:
ISBA’s Meet Me at the Bar. The Illinois State Bar Association is offering a FREE 6-month membership for any non-members who haven’t been members for the past 2 years. Great bar association & IT’S FREE!
Chicago Bar Association’s Lawyer Referral Service. This is either my best or a close second best source of business…if you can qualify, SIGN-UP NOW! I think bar association lawyer referral services are generally good and rather inexpensive forms of marketing where there’s not much to lose. But the CBA really differentiates itself by the marketing it does for the referral service. It does a combination of Google, print media, and cable TV advertising that really gets the phone ringing. It’s $200 per year and I probably earned $5,000 from that $200 investment last year.
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Peter,
I enjoyed reading your post advocating the value you get when joining a Bar association. Practicing attorneys in Chicago have access to several Bar membership opportunities. Chicago lawyers should not forget the American Bar Association (ABA) which is headquartered in Chicago. One unique feature available to lawyer members of the ABA is insurance that gives back. We like to say that ABA members can GET quality, affordable insurance from trusted sources and GIVE back to the legal profession at the same time.
That’s because the American Bar Endowment (ABE), established by the ABA as an affiliated public charity in 1942, sponsors insurance plans exclusively for ABA members. While many other state and local bars sponsor insurance plans for their members, ABE’s plans are different — insured members are asked to donate their share of any dividends generated from the plan back to the ABE. The 85% of members who do so each year are eligible for a charitable tax deduction for the amount of the donated dividend. (Members may also annually request that dividends be returned to them.)
ABE uses the dividend donations to help support over 200 law-related public service, education, and research projects through annual grants to the American Bar Foundation (http://www.americanbarfoundation.org ) and the ABA’s Fund for Justice and Education (http://new.abanet.org/fje ) No other state or specialty bar association that I’m aware of has an insurance program that’s structured this way.Check it out! http://www.abendowment.org/insurance/index.asp
Reneé Z. Leskiw, ABE Executive Director