Let’s talk about the sad, short life of a lawyer’s business card.

It gets shipped to you from the printer. It sits in a box. Eventually, it comes out of the box and goes into your fancy metal or leather business card holder. It spends considerable time getting jostled about while living in your pocket or purse. Some cards spend months or even years living in the shipping box and then in the case, never seeing the light of day.

Finally, in one glorious moment, the card emerges from the case. It sees sunshine (or fluorescent bulbs) briefly before it’s shoved into the pocket or purse of a different person. Sadly, it spends only a few seconds in the light, and then it’s back to darkness once again.

That night, or maybe later, the card emerges. It gets pulled out, and things start to happen. There are several possibilities for its future:

• It gets scanned and stored in Evernote or in some other repository.
• It gets read, and the info gets typed into a directory of some sort for later action.
• It gets put into a pile of other business cards and a rubber band squeezes them all together and keeps them neat.
• Or, and this is most likely, it gets unceremoniously dumped in the trash, where it ends up recycled or in a landfill.

Business cards live a sad life, and then they die. Life isn’t fair for business cards.

How to Prolong the Life of Your Business Card

That’s why some lawyers, generous souls, try to save the cards. They do cool things like have their card printed on a poker chip or a metal plate. These kind lawyers hope their cards might get retained by the recipient and stored in a place of honor. That approach likely does extend the life of the card—for a while.

Sadly, the poker chip business cards, the metal plates, the rolling paper cards, the ninja star cards, etc. all end up with their brethren. The novelty eventually wears off, and they go. They too end up in the trash.

A better approach is to incorporate the card into a tool. I was presented with a lien calculator the other day by a construction lawyer. His spinning calculator figures out how long a contractor’s lien lasts. It’s got the lawyer’s contact info on it, and it has a disclaimer on the back (of course, since it’s made by a lawyer, right?).

The calculator looks cool, it’s functional, and it serves as a business card in addition to being useful to this lawyer’s ideal clients.

Is this tool going in the trash? No way. In fact, it’s likely to sit out on the desk, waiting to get used. It’ll be sitting right up front where the prospective client can see it and so that his co-workers, visitors, and others can see it as well.

This lawyer has found a way to turn his card into a keeper. Can you do the same?