Lawyer Business Advantage

Lawyer Business Advantage


Law Firm Marketing for Introverts with Kirsten Howe

July 06, 2020

In this episode of Lawyer Business Advantage, I have a conversation with Kirsten Howe, President of Absolute Trust Counsel, a boutique estate planning firm in the San Francisco Bay Area. Kirsten may be humble, but she’s a marketing whiz. Kirsten discusses how her practice has evolved from corporate work to estate planning, trust and probate, to new growing niches in the estate planning field. Along the way, you’ll hear her perspectives on marketing for introverts and using a team based approach to marketing. Hear Kirsten’s stories, get some great ideas and supercharge your marketing!
Alay Yajnik: [00:00:49] Welcome to Lawyer Business Advantage, your source for biz dev tips, wisdom and inspiration. I’m your host, Alay Yajnik. We’re unleashing your inner rainmaker in three, two, one….
Alay Yajnik: [00:01:04] And I’m very pleased to welcome to the show Kirsten Howe, President of Absolute Trust Counsel. Kirsten, welcome.
Kirsten Howe: [00:01:11] Thank you, Alay. I’m really happy to be here.
Alay Yajnik: [00:01:14] Well, I’m excited to have you here, and to have such a veteran podcast here with us here today. Thanks a lot for taking the time.
Kirsten Howe: [00:01:22] I’m happy to do it. Thank you for inviting me. I’m honored.
Alay Yajnik: [00:01:26] And I’m flattered! We can go on like this for an hour.
Kirsten Howe: [00:01:29] Yeah.
Alay Yajnik: [00:01:31] So I’m really familiar with your practice. We’ve known each other for a long time, but a lot of our listeners may not be as familiar with what you do. So before we get into things, tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your practice.
Kirsten Howe: [00:01:46] Ok. So I am an attorney. I’m an estate planning attorney, and my law firm is exclusively dedicated to estate planning and those kinds of matters. My law firm is Absolute Trust Counsel. So we do wills and trusts, probate trusts, administrations. We do special needs planning. And we also do government benefits planning for long term care. And we are located in Walnut Creek. I’ve been in Walnut Creek for…let’s see…I’m just going to say over 20 years. I don’t want to put a number. And I’ve been an attorney for a really long time. Let’s just say that I’ve almost always been in Walnut Creek. I guess most of my career has been out here in Walnut Creek. I started out as a business lawyer and then gradually made the shift over to the estates and trusts world.
Alay Yajnik: [00:02:46] Well, Walnut Creek, California, for those of you that aren’t familiar with it, it’s a bit of a bedroom community. So there’s a lot of, you know, an aging population and a lot of people that are, you know, that have a real need for estate planning and elder care. Kirsten, as we’ve known each other, I’ve always known you as an estate planning attorney, and I’d love to hear about what it was that made you make the transition from being a business attorney to an estate planning attorney.
Kirsten Howe: [00:03:13] Sure. The business work that I did, I was working with small companies, you know, usually a company that has one or two or three owners and we would be their general counsel. There are companies that are too small to have a legal department in-house. So we did everything they needed or found another attorney who could do the thing that we couldn’t do. And I enjoyed that because working with a owner of a small business, you’re working usually with the decision maker as opposed to, you know, working with a department head within a giant corporation. And I really like that personal kind of interaction.