Writing a Business Case for Law Firm Web Projects

No matter what size your law firm is, investment in a redesign of your firm’s website is likely to be a significant expense. Agency fees, production expenses, staff time, and opportunity costs all add up to a big number that needs to be properly justified. This is where the business case comes in - the subject of this article.

There is lots of guidance available on how to write a business case. You might even have a standard model that you use in your own firm. Our approach is based on guidance from the Association of Project Management (APM), which we have tailored to the particular needs of law firm website projects.

The purpose of a business case is to decide if a new website is a worthwhile use of your firm’s resources. It aims to prove whether a website meets the needs of your firm better than any other option, outline possible benefits, and explore the risks, costs and time involved. It should then conclude with an investment appraisal that weighs up the expected benefits against the planned cost of achieving them.

The first step is to outline the reasons for considering a new website in the first place.

1. Reasons

This is the section where you outline why your firm needs a new website. Be specific. Your reasons will almost certainly boil down to: attract new clients, get new business from existing ones, or attract top flight staff. However, your project stands a much better chance of success if you can detail the reasons more precisely. An example of a well defined reason for initiating a new web design project for your law firm would be something like this:

“45% of our firms total billings currently comes from real estate matters despite the fact that only 20% of fee-earners sit in the real estate department. Fee-earners aren’t cross referring effectively, and awareness of our expertise in other department, particularly employment and pensions, asset finance and capital markets, is low amongst existing clients.

The real estate department has made good use of the current website to the point where they have almost assumed ownership. We feel this is discouraging other departments from taking part and that a change in design and structure would encourage other departments to make better use of the resource, and would promote cross-selling between departments.”

Each firm will have their own reasons, and it is worth spending time to find out all the reasons behind your own decision. It is helpful to think of reasons in two categories:

Strategic reasons such as:

• Change in positioning?
• New expertise?
• New locations?
• Change in management?
• New brand identity?

Functional or operational reasons such as:

• Problems with existing agency
• Problems with technology or publishing process
• Problems with the way the site is indexed by search engines
• Problems with usability or user experience

2. Options

As the person charged with marketing your law firm, it is your responsibility to achieve the benefits your firm demands in the most cost effective way possible. The purpose of this section is to outline all the possible options available to help you address the reasons given in section 1 and to show that work on your firm’s website is the best option. Of course, if you find through this exercise that it isn’t the best option, you can abort the project without having committed more than a couple of hours thinking time.

Options you could show you’ve considered may include:

• Refresh rather than redesign
• Meet the need offline with activities like events, direct mail, and brochures
• Have partners spend more telephone time with clients
• Build a team and complete the project in house
• Run a training programme to improve marketing effectiveness

Don’t forget that doing nothing is one very cheap option available to you. Your business case should show that you have considered what would happen if you didn’t run the project at all. This is an exercise in prudent management. It should demonstrate that you’ve considered the alternatives and that this really is the best course of action.

3. Benefits

Having explored the reasons and considered your options the next step is to outline the benefits of the chosen solution. Try to included every possible benefit. This will help you to complete a full investment appraisal later in the business case.

Wherever possible, it is a good idea try and quantify the benefits. You might go for something like this:

• Generate 25 new business enquiries per month.
• Attract 150 candidates who meet our training contract requirements.
• Increase the number of press opportunities from 8 to 20 per month.

Of course, not all benefits can be quantified in this way. For less concrete outcomes, provide written descriptions that paint a picture of what the future will look like. 

4. Opportunities and Threats

In many ways, planning is really just guessing, and a business plan for a law firm website is no different. There are many things that may affect the actual outcome of your web design project. Some of these will affect the project for the better, and some may put it at risk. We refer to these as opportunities and threats and it is worth thinking about them now.

Make a list of all the things that might affect the project. Put them in two piles - opportunities in one and threats in the other. For each threat, decide how likely it is, and to what extent it will affect the project. Give highest priority in your planning to those which are most likely and will have the highest impact. Write each threat in your business case and outline the actions you will take to try and avoid or overcome it.

Now do the same thing with opportunities. What things might happen which would open up new opportunities? What would the effect on the project be, and how would you maximise the benefits for your firm? Add these to your business case document.

5. Cost

The whole purpose of the business case is to justify the cost, so it is important to produce an accurate estimate. Include hard costs like agency and production fees, and also make an allowance for staff time. Break the budget down and justify each area of expense to show that the costings are as accurate as possible.

Staff time can be estimated on a pure cost, or an opportunity cost basis. Pure cost accounts for time at the hourly rate it costs the firm to employ each individual. Opportunity cost evaluates time at each person’s charge-out rate. Lawyers are normally accounted for using opportunity cost and support staff at pure cost.

Give consideration also to the on-going costs. Do you need professional help to keep on top of maintaining the site and keeping one step ahead on the search engine optimisation front, for example? Online marketing can be time consuming, so make sure you understand how much monthly input you will need from everyone involved.

6. Timescales

Human are generally very bad at estimating time. To help improve the accuracy of your estimates, break down the work into small tasks and estimate these individually and add them up to reach a total. Once you have the total resource requirement (in man hours) you can look at how to resource the project based on the time, money, and man-power available to you.

Your timescale may be affected by a compelling event; that is an event by which time the project must be complete. If this applies to you then simply work backwards from the deadline and resource the project as required.
You may need external help to make estimates, especially when you are hiring an agency to do the work for you. At Isaac Parker, we estimate timescale on the basis of 3 cycles lasting 4 to 8 weeks for our side of the work. On top of that you need to allow as much time as it will take to collect and deliver feedback to your design agency. You should also allow time to create, proof and edit content which can very quickly eat up an awful lot of time.

Three to six months is a typical end-to-end timescale, although it could take anything up to a year if yours is a very large firm or very complex changes are being considered.

7. Investment Appraisal

The investment appraisal is where you bring all the aspects of the business case together aiming to quantify value for money. You start by putting a value on each benefit. Websites typically have a shelf life of between 3 to 5 years so multiply annual benefits by the same figure. From the total value of benefits, take away the cost of development plus any allowance for annual maintenance.

The resulting figure is your predicted return on investment and should be at least twice the cost of development. If your ROI isn’t that high, then it might be worth reconsidering your figures or questioning the wisdom of starting a new web project at all - your partners would be better off putting their money in the bank for 5 years and taking the interest payments!

8. Evaluation

The evaluation stage of a business case may not form part of the written document. The investment appraisal should have covered that. This is the part where you look at your work with a critical eye. It is helpful to leave a break of a couple of days before coming back to look with fresh eyes. Does this still sound like a wise move?

The final step is presenting the business case to whoever is going to sign the cheque. The ground work you have put in should put you in a strong position that demonstrates why this is the best course of action.

Checking Progress

We’ve been publishing this newsletter for a little over six months now, so I thought it would be a good point to stop, review, and make sure we’re giving you what you need.

Readership is increasing at a rate of just over 10% per month, and almost half our subscribers are from outside the UK. The word is obviously getting out and the statistics are really encouraging. The numbers are no substitute for real feedback though, and it would be great to hear from you personally if there’s anything we can do to make sure our services really are meeting your needs.

If you are new to our newsletter, or if you’d like to hear about what we’ve been up to over the past six months, then please read on. Otherwise, you can bail out here. We’ll be back in two weeks with the usual diet of expert advice and practical tips to help you market your firm online. If you do stick around, then we’ve got a rare special offer. Not to be missed if you’re thinking of reviewing your firm’s website this spring.

The past six months has been a transitionary period for Isaac Parker. After five years as a generalist web design agency, we launched in to the law firm web design scene in August 2009.

While it might seem odd to go from general design agency to legal sector specialist almost overnight, it is really the coming together of two fields of experience. Before starting Isaac Parker in 2005 I was responsible for competitive intelligence, and key client and practice group research at a leading European law firm.

Building Expertise

The process of specialisation started with conscious effort to build expertise, and a report we wrote on trends in law firm graduate recruitment websites. It was an instant success, downloaded by representatives from most of the best respected law firms in the world. Many of you reading this newsletter today will have found us for the first time through that report.

This newsletter started early on too, initially as a monthly publication. The first edition went out to just 10 people. After a few months it was clear that we have a lot more to give than we are able to get through monthly. Publishing went fortnightly in February and we’ve written around 30,000 words of content so far - almost enough to publish a book on the subject. Watch this space!

Developing process

The second stream of effort has been in building tools of implementation that makes our knowledge useful to law firms. The end result is the Book, which is now at the heart of all our services. Creating the Book is a diagnostic and strategic process that ensures any recommendations we make are built on firm foundations. This stage of an engagement takes 4 weeks from beginning to end, and begins with 2 to 5 days working with you on-site.

Much like a doctor might order blood tests and an x-ray before prescribing medication, the process of creating the Book lets us see deep inside your firm in order to collect evidence from which sound recommendations can be made. It’s our version of due diligence.

The Book runs to around 60 pages. It is a roadmap and strategic reference on which we build the rest of the creative process. You can see an example further down the page.

Supporting the Community

Most of our effort has been directed towards developing tools and expertise, but there’s one initiative about which doesn’t fall into that category - our annual pro bono award. We ran a pilot project in 2009 with international law firm Herbert Smith, but this was the first year we held a proper competition. To enter, law firms send us a one-page description of a charitable project they are involved in. We review the entries and choose the one would most benefit from our help. The prize is a design and consultancy fund worth £15,000.

Michelmores Solicitors in Exeter won the prize on behalf of Hospiscare, a hospice charity who give free, high-quality care and support to people who are terminally ill. At the time of writing we are just putting the finishing touches to their Book and hope to have work on the site completed by the end of the summer.

We can’t share the full extent of our strategic guidance, for obvious reasons, but here a sneaky peek at some of what’s involved:

Defining audience

Evaluating options

Crunching numbers

We’re a small agency, and all this work building expertise and implementation tools is a huge amount of development in a short space of time. I’d love to hear what you make of it, especially if there’s anything else you think we should be doing to meet the needs of the legal sector.

Looking forward

No review is complete without setting up some goals for the future. While the last few months has been about laying foundations, the rest of this year is about putting it into practice. We’re looking to sign-up around four new firms this year. Two by the end of April, and two later in the year.

Are you one of them?

Join Us

To celebrate the coming of spring here in the UK, and to encourage your prompt action, we’re running a very limited special offer.

The next firm to place an order for £15,000 or more will have their account credited with an additional £3,000 worth of service without charge.

Use the extra money to build a more ambitious project than you could otherwise afford, have new e-newsletter templates designed, or use it to have your firm’s brochure updated to match your new website. It really is up to you.

If this sounds good, all you need to do is give us a call and mention this offer. The offer is open until the end of April or until it’s been claimed, whichever come first. This offer is now closed.

You’ll find our contact details here.

Three Marketing Tips for Trainee Solicitors

With many law firms freezing or reducing head count, 2009 was a difficult year for trainee solicitors and law students. Training schemes were put on hold and jobs weren’t available for NQs completing training contracts. Popular opinion is that the effects of the recession will be felt in the graduate recruitment market for several years to come, despite improvements in the economy at large. Competition for training contracts remains fierce, and prospects for those completing their training this year are also far from certain. It is from this standpoint that I’ve been thinking about how marketing skills can be developed by young lawyers as a way of making themselves more valuable players in the firms that employ them.

I strongly suspect that given the choice, most firms would rather keep good staff than let them go. With that in mind, I hope this newsletter will help marketing departments and HR personnel to design programmes that teach their young staff skills needed, not only for a profitable legal career, but which also lead to increased fee-income for the firm in the short- and medium-term.

Personal branding and differentiation are becoming increasingly important in an economy characterised by increasing competition and globalisation; not to mention the shake-ups that will inevitably happen as firms and clients grapple with the implications of alternative business structures and the commoditisation of the legal sector.

This newsletter is written from the perspective of giving advice to a student or a trainee solicitor. I do hope however that as a marketing or HR professional this advice will give you food for thought and you can use it to develop training and selection processes of your own.

1. Take Responsibility

The law has always been a competitive profession, but it is perhaps more so now that at any other time in history. For every educated, articulate, and rounded young lawyer there are now scores of other equally educated, articulate, and well-rounded young substitutes ready to take their place. Combine that with trends such as globalised out-sourcing and we find ourselves with truly challenging times in which to be starting a career. Challenging but not impossible.

The problem for most trainees and students is not the presence of substitutes per se, but rather the fact that any given person is indistinguishable from the next. Understanding that as the problem means you can start to take responsibility for it. Step one - eliminate the competition.

2. Specialise early

Traditionally, the advice to new lawyers is not to specialise too early. My advice is the exact opposite. The thinking goes that specialising too early results in you being pigeon-holed for the rest of your career. What people fail to realise though, is that some of those pigeon holes are stuffed full of the spoils of success, and are therefore exactly where you want to be. Your specialism is your USP. Its the thing that eliminates possible alternatives, and which makes you valuable and attractive to employers and clients alike.

Choosing something to specialise in doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t be practicing in other areas. In fact, during a training contract you’ll be working in completely unrelated areas, and will probably have to maintain your specialism in your own time.

Remember the aim at this stage is to give yourself an edge over your competitors. You need to choose something where you can be fairly confident of being the most knowledgeable person in the world. Lofty ambitions for a beginning lawyer? That all depends how big your world is!

The recommended approach to choosing a specialism is to start with a general area in which you are interested and keep narrowing your focus until the idea of being the world’s expert seems feasible. An example probably makes this clearer.

Consider starting with commercial law and keep drilling down until the topic feels manageable:

• Commercial Law
• Technology, Media, and Sports Law
• Sports Law
• Football Contracts
• Players Obligations
• Clauses relating to the obligation to maintain a high level of fitness.

A new lawyer or student stands a good chance of becoming the world’s expert in “clauses relating to the obligation for football players to maintain a high level of fitness” after a few hours research and study. This could be broadened to “players obligations” over the space of a few months and over several years, a lucrative and fulfilling career can be built on being a leading authority on football contracts, or sports law more generally.

3. Build a personal brand

Lawyers who can bring a following of potential clients are highly valuable and can expect rapid progression in their careers. Building a following and personal brand is a lengthy process and can take many months, years even, to get fully established. The good news is that aside from the time commitment, websites like Wordpress and Twitter have made it inexpensive and very easy to get your message to the world.

If you are a lawyer or trainee and your firm offers good tools and management support that enable you to build a personal following then I strongly advise you to take full advantage. It is always better to have the support of your colleagues that to go it completely alone. If these things are not available to you then lobby hard to get them. If both those option fail you then go ahead and set them up yourself. I’ve included links to some good books that may set you on the right path.

Over the coming decade we expect the numbers of lawyers self-promoting, publishing online, and building personal brands to grow exponentially. The cost of entry is now so low that individuals don’t need the financial support of a large firm to build their own following. Firms may choose to ignore this trend, but those self-promoting individuals will likely be your most articulate, personable, and capable staff. Failure to recognise this trend and offer management-sanctioned support will ultimately lead to a weakening of the talent pool and dire consequences for the long-term health of your firm.

For examples of individuals already building personal brands with the endorsement of their firm check out Straun Robertson of Pinsent Masons, Andrew Sharpe of Charles Russell, or Deirdre Kilroy of LK Shields.

In summary

If you are a trainee, student, or newly qualified lawyer then I hope this newsletter have give you some ideas about how to set yourself up for a successful and fulfilling career. If you work in HR or marketing functions in a law firm then I urge you to consider how this trend will affect your firm and how you might consider helping lawyers to develop personal brands that are compatible with the goals of the firm as a whole.

Finally, and before the excuses start flooding in, I should say that this is a model for excellence. Not all lawyers will have the ability, skill, commitment, and/or determination required to see a programme like this through to the end. It can be very time-consuming and mostly non-chargeable. I would expect marketing professionals to see the long term benefits of such a programme, but partners quite likely won’t. Until your work starts generating fees, most old hands prefer that trainees help them develop their practice (which of course they should), but young lawyers must also lay foundations for their own. This is a difficult path but as the saying goes - there’s no gain without pain!

Further Reading

There are hundreds of good websites and books about building a personal brand online, but these are two I can personally recommend:

1. The Unconventional Guide to the Social Web
by Chris Guillebeau and Gwen Bell
http://unconventionalguides.com/socialweb.htm

2. Crush It!
by Gary Vernerchuk
http://crushitbook.com/

Law Firm Social Media

Pretty much every week I get asked about about social media, and what it means for law firms. Never one to automatically jump on a band wagon, I’ve been holding out on giving the definitive answer. Until now.

Two of my favourite events - the annual TED conference and the Winter Olympics - are running back-to-back this year, so its surprising that any work is getting done around here at all. But inspiration come at the most unexpected times, and it was while watching Jamie Oliver collect his TED Prize that it hit me. The TED conference is precisely the approach law firms should be taking to social media.

For those of your that don’t know what TED is, here is a brief introduction:

TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has expanded to include science, business, the arts and the global issues facing our planet.

Over four days, 50 speakers each take an 18-minute slot. There are no breakout groups and everyone shares the same experience. Following the conference, all the talks are published online under the strapline “Ideas worth spreading”.

I’ve compiled a list of recommended viewing. You might want to go and have a look at some of the TED videos before I talk about how this applies to law firm marketing online.

There are all sort of talks by people like Bill Clinton, Bono, Jamie Oliver, and David Blaine, but the list below all feature either lawyers, or marketing topics, so you can legitimately call it work if your Managing Partner happens to walk by!

• Mena Trott on Blogs
• Seth Godin on the tribes we lead
• Larry Lessig on laws that choke creativity
• Jonathan Zittrain: The Web as random acts of kindness

What does this mean to a law firm?

All law firm marketing should communicate unique expertise, demonstrate exceptional levels of service, or help you build a relationship. Social media should, at least in theory, be able to meet all three of those needs. How one goes about it, however, seems to be the million dollar question. In my mind the real question is one of appropriateness:

How can law firms leverage the social media tools available today, while maintaining a level of flair and sophistication we expect of a firm of expensive expert professionals?

The TED model of social media gives us an approach that is highly appropriate to our needs, because it operates on several levels.

Level 1: An exclusive live event

The live event is an exclusive invitation only affair. In that respect it is very similar the client seminars you probably already run. By working on the quality of your seminar programmes it is possible to transform them into highly desirable occasions.

To run your events programme in the style of the TED conference invite speakers from a diverse range of backgrounds. Concentrate on high-level cutting-edge topics. Ask speakers to give 15 minutes of super high quality content, instead of spinning the same content over an hour session like normal.

Think about inviting influential clients to give talks too. The talks don’t have to (perhaps shouldn’t) be all about legal developments.

At this level you are communicate unique expertise, demonstrating exceptional levels of service, and building relationships with clients and other groups you already know about.

Level 2: An online showcase

Supporting the live event is the online showcase. This is where you make edited recordings of the event available, free-of-charge to the public at large. Videos would be posted according to a schedule according to the quantity of content available to you. TED publish a new video every day, but you might opt for weekly, or even monthly publication. Posting this sort of material online takes guts. Your work will be available for everyone to see, and that includes prospective clients, competitors, your staff, and the press. It takes a confident firm to be so open about their thinking. The bravery aspect is partly what makes this so effective. It is also the cornerstone of great, effective social media.

At this level you can communicate unique expertise to people who know your firm, and you start to build awareness with those that don’t.

Level 3: Spreading the ideas

The final level on which this model works is the on going dialogue that will take place after you set your content free. By providing sharing and discussion tools you enable content to spread far and wide. People who are really engaged by what you have to say will continue the discussion and invite people they know to join in.

Here you have the opportunity of building relationships with groups you don’t already know you.

What does firm social media look like?

The diagram below shows the key components of a website that acts as a repository for video content, and provides social media functions.

1. Video Player

Video player for viewing footage. Choose a custom designed player for true professionalism, or opt for an embedded video using a service like YouTube or Vimeo if your budget is tight.

2. Make it personal

Give key biographical details about the person speaking. If it’s one of your lawyers then don’t forget to include contact details as a way of generating leads.

3. Encourage sharing

Social media buttons enable visitors to quickly share your content on a wide variety of different websites. Services like AddThis give you cut and paste code for this functionality.

4. Enable and Encourage Debate

First write your community guidelines and link to them at the top of the comments section. The aim is to encourage serious intellectual discussion, so it is useful to be able to point to a set of rules if someone steps out of line.

The debating aspect is just like the comments feature you find on most blogs. Most systems allow you to screen comments before they go live in order to keep control over what is said by others on your site.

5. Build a relationship

The reason for publishing the videos over a period of time is that it keeps people coming back to see what’s new. Use an email sign-up form to collect leads and to alert people when new content becomes available.

Law Firm Homepage Design

Patterns are used in all sorts of industries as a short cut to delivering best practice. In the same way that lawyers have a bank of precedents, and boiler-plate clauses to draw upon, good web designers have patterns they use as a jumping off point for tackling a specific client’s brief.

In this newsletter, I’m going to share with you the four common patterns used on law firm homepages. I’ll show you a sketch layout to help identify each one, and I’ll give a brief description of the advantages and disadvantages to help you assess the suitability of your own firm’s homepage.

Patterns can save a huge amount of time, and allow us to focus on the issues specific to each client, but they are never a substitute for experience. Like many rules in life, the real skill is in knowing when to break them.

1. The Big Splash

The big splash is full of impact and is characterised by the use of a full-width, iconic image that occupies more than one third of the vertical height of the space above the crease. (The crease being an imaginary line above which content will fit on the screen without scrolling).

The Big Splash might look like this:

The big splash has the ability to provoke an instant emotional response. For this reason is commonly used by firms who aim to distinguish themselves in the market based on personality (in my view, a fairly weak position).

Stronger differentiators, such as geographic specialism and industry expertise, can also be communicated well using this model. Success lies in the sophisticated selection of imagery.

2. The Information Portal

The information portal gets large quantities of information up front on the homepage. Information is usually organised into columns, and font weights and image size are employed to establish the relative importance of different categories of content.

The Information Portal might look like this:

Demonstrating breadth and expertise concurrently can be a big challenge, particularly for the very biggest firms. The information portal model helps to solve this problem by putting huge amounts of content up front.

It is not uncommon to find more than one hundred links, which take readers deep into the site site. Because of this, care should be taken when designing the site more generally, to ensure it is easy to navigate. Readers should never be taken deep in to your site without providing an easy way for them to get back or move around within the chosen content area.

3. The Fork in the Road

While many firms still have a lot of work to do when it comes to communicating a unique proposition, many are at least categorising their content according to basic reader types. If you are a small firm, this normally takes the form of two options given equal weight: ‘business, or individual’. In larger practices we’d expect to see separation by by narrower categories such as practice area or industry sector.

The fork in the road might look like this:

This approach is a smart move provided you reward readers with content that is actually tailored to their preference. Content that is focused on a particular type of reader is always more effective than general content aimed at a wide audience.

If you chose this model, do make sure you collect statistics on which link your readers click on. You might find that your practice is more biased to one category than you initially thought.

4. The Personal Touch

If you’re a law firm that believes the people are the product, then you could do a lot worse than the personal touch. This model is characterised by professional portraits or ‘lifestyle’ imagery of fee-earners in action, combined with a first-person narrative and direct quotations.

The Personal Touch might look like this:

This model is a really smart way to connect with readers on a personal level. If you use photography that makes direct eye contact with the camera, the effect is magnified. Because of this, you must make sure that your firm can deliver the exceptional levels of service that readers will come to expect.

Choosing a layout for your homepage is one of the most important decisions you will have to make as your design your law firm’s website. Which approach is best suited to you need will depend of a huge range of factors, not least the wider positioning and strategy your firm has adopted.

Finally, these models don’t have to be used alone. The days when scrolling was frowned upon are pretty much over. There’s no reason why you couldn’t have a Big Splash above an Information Portal, or a Fork in the Road laid over The Personal Touch. Experiment and have fun!

Law Firm Web Marketing Health Check

This Health Check quiz is designed to help you evaluate your existing website and identify areas for improvement. Grab some paper and a pen, answer the questions and add up your score at the end.

1. Competitive Review

1.1 Can you name your 10 closest competing firms?
(10 points)

1.2 Have you identified the strengths and weaknesses of each competitor?
(10 points)

1.3 Have you benchmarked your website against your competitors in terms of:
(5 points each)

• Positioning
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Application of Brand
• Lead Generation

2. Positioning

2.1 Does your firm have a clearly articulated, differentiated claim of expertise?
(25 points)

2.2 Is that claim of expertise is published on the homepage of your website?
(25 points)

3. Law Firm Branding

3.1 Does your website’s branding accurately represent the culture and personality of your firm? Evaluate you branding in terms of:
(10 points each)

• Visual apprearance (colour, layout, imagery).
• Tone of voice (words on the page).
• Visual appearance and tone of voice are applied consistently.

4. Homepage Handicap

4.1 Does your home page contains a Flash animation in combination with the words “Click to Enter Site”.
(Loose 25 points)

4.2 Does the first sentence on you homepage begin “[Firm Name] was founded in 19…”?
(Loose 25 points)

5. Lead Generation

5.1 Do you publish any of the following, and do you collect contact information from the recipients in the process?
(10 points each)

• Newsletter
• Thought Leadership
• Original Research
• Enquiry Form

6. Optimisation Strategy

6.1 Have you identified all the important keywords people use to search for the tyeps of services you provide?
(25 points)

6.2 Have you optimised every page of content for:
(5 points each)

• title tags
• meta description
• urls
• headlines
• body copy

6.3 Are your most important documents only available as PDF downloads?
(Loose 25 points)

7. Systematic Process for Content Production

7.1 Have you identified all the types of content your law firm might need to publish online?
(10 points)

7.2 Have you identified all the events that could trigger the need to produce content?
(10 points)

7.3 Have you delivered training to everyone in your firm who is involved in content production?
(10 points)

7.4 Do you have in place support services to help content producers? Do your staff have easy access to:
(2 points each)

• Copy-writing
• Photography (stock library or staff photographer)
• Research / News Feeds (PSLs, librarians, and/or databases)
• Graphics Production (for graphs, charts, etc)
• Translation

8. Social Media

8.1 Have you considered using any of the following social media platforms?
(2 points each)

• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
• Lawyrs

8.2 Are you active on at least one social network?
(5 points)

8.3 Have you won clients or recruited staff through social networking this year?
(5 points)

Triggering Law Firm Web Content Production

In this newsletter we look at the problem of getting people in your law firm, particularly fee-earners, to co-operate with your ongoing effort to produce useful website content. We describe our ‘trigger lists’ content strategy for law firms and give you a step-by-step guide that shows you how to implement it for your law firm’s website. The newsletter finishes with a practical example showing the process applied to the lawyer profile section of your website.

An event-based approach to law firm content strategy

Building a website for a law firm with several hundred fee-earners can be a large task, but at the point the site goes live things are only really just getting started. Successful websites continue to evolve and grow with the work of the firm and provide visitors with timely and useful information.  Doing this well requires the input of more that just the marketing department.

The main challenge faced by those charged with managing a law firm’s profile online come from being several steps removed from the work of fee-earners and the interest of clients.  Information often arrives in the marketing department in a piecemeal fashion, with marketers having to take the initiative to ask fee-earners for information they can turn in to useful content. At times it can feel like you’re doing battle with the people you’re working hard to promote.

Defining the root of the problem

As marketers we are trained to see information that comes across our desks in terms of it’s marketing and promotional potential. This sometimes makes it hard for us to understand why people don’t tell us about things.  Looked at this way, the problem becomes one of training and process. We need to teach people what we are looking for, and provide a clear process for delivering it.

Triggering information flow

Given that those people who are closest to the source material, cannot necessarily identify it’s marketing potential we need to put in place a process that facilitate information flow without the need for marketing expertise. The simplest route would be to conduct all the assessments yourself by asking your lawyers to call you anytime they work on something new.  Taken logically to the point of being ridiculous this simple approach could result in you being told the intimate details of every lawyer’s working day.

Multiplied by several hundred fee-earners and you’d find yourself working in a firm with a very busy marketing department, a huge phone bill and very little fee-earning going on!

Another approach is tackling the skills gap by teaching lawyers to recognise marketing potential for you. This might work in small firms, but large firm will likely struggle to get widespread commitment from fee-earners to undergo training to a suitable degree of expertise.

The third solution, and the one I recommend you try in your firm, is the systematic identification of triggering events for each type of content you publish, combined with training for those people in the firm who will be able to provide the earliest alert.

It is the responsibility of everyone in the firm to look out for triggers and to alert the person responsible for creating the associated website content. Training should focus on teaching everyone in the firm which triggers they are likely to come across in their day-to-day work, and who should be told.

If these actions are properly defined it should be clear for every type of content you publish:

• What event causes this content to be produced
• Who should be looking out for it
• Who should be alerted
• Who is responsible for creating that content
• Where the producer can get support services
• Who can check the resulting content and approve it for publication

Putting it into Practice

The triggers system is easy to set-up if you follow this simple 5 step process.

Step 1 – Identify content types

The first step to implementing triggers in you firm is to identify all the different types of content you’re publishing. If you’re using a content management system of decent quality, this should just be a case of going to your ‘create content section’ and printing off the list of options. Alternatively, you can reverse engineer your list by systematically clicking through all the pages on your site.

Your list will typically include items such as:

• Firm profile
• Office locations
• Lawyer profiles
• News articles / Press releases
• Practice group descriptions
• Cases, deals, and tombstones
• Key client profiles
• Testimonials

Step 2 – Identify triggers and the people closest to them

For each content type, think about the event that arise in the day to day operation of your firm that give rise to the need to create or modify that kind of content on your firms website. For even the most specialised content type you will usual be able to come up with between 5 and 10 trigger events.

Next, for each trigger, identify the person who is most likely to be the first to hear of that event. These people will either be the originator of the event themselves, or else they will be well placed to hear of it at an early stage. Getting fee-earner co-operation is notoriously difficult, so think as widely as you can, especially amongst the support functions.  It’s a bit like starting a spy ring within your own firm!

Step 3 – Identify the people involved

The team of trusty spies identified in step 2 are going to alert you to events in the firm that you will be able to use to produce content. However, they are not always (rarely in fact) the person who has the most information to help your craft your content. The next person to identify for each trigger is the person most likely to be able to help you flesh out your piece. Aim for the most junior person who will have enough information to be useful.

At this stage you also need to identify the person who will be able to sign off the content, once you have written it. The triggers process is a pro-active one from the point of view of the marketing department. The idea is that by the time you meet with a partner or senior member of staff you should already have an almost finished piece of content.

This changes the conversation from “can you write a piece for the website” to “I’ve written this piece for the website, can you check it”. The second approach is more likely to get you a rapid response.

Step 4 – Identify sources of support

At every step of the process, your aim is to make life as easy for other people in your firm as possible. This means giving the appropriate support to enable them to help you.  For each trigger, identify the different sources of support that people can draw on. This could be research services like the library or information centre, technical assistance such as photographers and graphic designer, or a copywriting and proofing service to help whip a rough draft into shape.

Step 5 – Training

The ins and outs of training would be enough to fill another newsletter entirely, so I’m not going to go into a huge amount of detail here. The key thing though is to structure training sessions according to the role each person or group of people. Training is generally best delivered on a need-to-know basis. Unless someone shows particular interest, just teach the bare minimum needed to do a good job and make clear that you’re there to help if they need to know more.

A Practical Example

Now you have seen how the process works in detail, I’ll finish this month’s newsletter with a practical example. We use an Excel spreadsheet to prepare our trigger lists. Drop me an email if you would like a blank copy for your own use, and I’ll send one over to you.

For this example we’ll take a content type that most firms will have on their website – the lawyer profile:

Lawyer Profile

Triggering Event	Provides the Alert	Produces the Content	Checks Content	Provides Support
Lawyer joins the firm	HR	Lawyer	Line Manager	Marketing / PR
Lawyer is promoted	HR/Lawyer	Lawyer	Line Manager	Marketing / PR
Completes deal of note	Lawyer	Lawyer	Line Manager	Marketing / PR / Library
Completes significant CPD	Training & Development	Lawyer	Training & Development	Marketing / PR
Receives good press	Library / News Feed	PR	Lawyer / Line Manager	Library
Changes practice group	Lawyer	Lawyer	Line Manager	Marketing / PR
Annual review	Calendar Event	Lawyer	Line Manager	Marketing / PR Lawyer / Line Manager
Leaves the firm	HR	Marketing	Marketing	Marketing

Law Firm Branding

As marketers of legal services, we all want to present our firms in the best possible light. Sometime it can feel like our hands are tied by the need to be taken seriously and unlike our colleagues in consumer markets we can’t rely on some of the more emotive drivers to win our customers attentions.

Looking for inspirational examples of exciting brands within the legal sector reveals slim pickings, so this month we’ve scoured the web to bring you a selection of brands, across all industries, that successful communicate a serious attitude to their field while remaining dynamic and interesting.

1. Cinven (Private Equity)

Cinven is a leading European buyout firm that acquires successful, high-quality companies across six key sectors and works closely with them to help them grow and develop. Cinven is responsible for many buyout industry ‘firsts’, including the first €1 billion plus buyouts in France, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK.

The Cinven site has a structure that is quite similar to that of some of the best sites in the legal sector. The strength of the site lies in its subtle use of media elements to enhance the messages within distracting from them.

Lessons for law firm branding: on brand graphic treatments to stock photography, video profiles for each of it’s investments that bring it’s holdings to life, and a youthful colour palette that sets the firm apart from it’s more austere competitors.

2. Amnesty International (Human Rights Charity)

Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who work to improve human rights through campaigning and international solidarity. It has more than 2.2 million members and subscribers in more than 150 countries and regions and it co-ordinates this support to act for justice on a wide range of issues.

Executions, stoning, and torture must certainly rank among the most serious topics you could write a website about. The design of the amnesty site employs a layout and design you might expect to find on a teen magazine. In this case the design, on first sight, seems friendly and accessible only to deliver shocking content once you brain has time to take it all in.

Lessons for law firm branding: the juxtaposition of fun and friendly with the shocking exaggerates the effect of the words and images and strengthens the message.

3. Euro NCAP (Automotive Testing)

Euro NCAP provides motoring consumers with an independent assessment of the safety performance of the most popular cars sold in Europe. Established in 1997, it is now backed by seven European Governments, the European Commission and motoring and consumer organisations in every EU country.

The scientific testing of vehicle safety is a highly technical topic; one where it would be easy to loose readers if the information isn’t pitched at the right level. Euro NCAP has solved this by offering information at two levels. Readers who just want to find star-ratings can use a search facility located prominently at the top left of every page and emotively titled “How safe is your car?”. Readers looking for technical information can browse the site to find full diagrams and descriptions of test methodologies.

Lessons for law firm branding: Information presented in forms to suit different audiences. Strong navigation and user-friendly search facility.

4. Sage (Accounting Software)

Sage provides business software, services and support to small and medium sized businesses. Traditionally it has been associated with accounting software, but over the last twenty years Sage have taken this experience and insight and applied it to other areas. It now offers a wide range of solutions from business stationery to customer relationship management.

Sage has managed the seemingly impossible by bringing excitement to a brand involved primarily in accountancy software. By focusing the entire brand around a key benefit - growing your business - Sage has been able to escape a historically dull image and increase the distance between itself and its competitors.

Lessons for law firm branding: amplify your firm’s unique selling point by using it to inspire a visual identity system.

5. TED (Education & Conferences)

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds:  Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences in California, USA and Oxford UK, TED now includes the award-winning TEDTalks video website, a new community program, and the annual TED Prize.

The speakers at the TED conference are leaders in their field and often cover some pretty heavy ideas. Bringing those ideas to the masses calls for a pretty special approach. Limiting each talk to 18 minutes, forces speakers to be succinct, with most using visual aids, live demonstrations and performances to get the point quickly.

Lessons for law firm branding: Video use on law firm websites is still largely limited to a brief office tour, or introduction by the managing partner. Why not set your staff the task of recording a TED style presentation for each of your key practice areas as a way of proving your expertise online.

7 Failings of Law Firm Web Design

1. Failure to Differentiate

The failure of firms to communicate a genuine difference between themselves and other firms.

In the UK there are maybe 10 firms, 20 at most, that can claim to be full service firms with any degree of credibility. To be a genuine full-service firm you need to have market-leading expertise in all the major practice areas. Despite the fact that it is impossible for a firm with less that 100 fee-earners to get anywhere close to full services, most firms still position themselves as generalists, and cite the same ‘benefits’ as every other firm.

It’s a shame that most firms still position themselves as generalists, since most do actually posses unique expertise that they could use as leverage. Consider geographic expertise, types of client you are best suited to serve, or practice area in which your firm has exceptional experience.
Firms would do well to capitalise on this expertise and communicate this through their marketing activities on- and off-line.

2. Failure to Illuminate

The failure of law firm websites to optimise their content for search engines.

A little experiment is in order to prove this point. I took ten fairly niche practice areas and entered them into Google adding the word ‘law’ to form a search phrase like ‘media law’. Of those ten searches, only two gave links where law firm’s websites came up in front page results.

Firms are clearly not effective in optimising for search engines. I suspect that there are three reasons for this:

• Under-developed content strategy
• Lack of training for staff involved in publishing content to the website
• Content management system that produce ineffective, bloated code that dilutes important keyword content.

Since there aren’t many firms doing it well, early investment in this area may lead to long-lasting advantages that will be difficult for competitors to catch up with.

3. Failure to Educate

The failure of law firm websites to produce reader-centered content.

Articles, press releases, and other know-how publications are widely employed tactics. In fact, I’m not aware of any firm in the top 200 that isn’t publishing one or more of these kinds of information on a regular basis.
Given that everyone is doing it, this kind of content isn’t a source of competitive advantage merely by its presence.

Firms must work hard to make their material relevant to clients and prospects. Don’t be selfish in your writing. Successful content is written from the readers point of view, not that of the firm. Be generous. Educate, guide and inspire. Impress your readers with generosity, and the quality of your analysis.

Along with your article, a short friendly notice stating that the content is for general use only is best practice. You can link to a more detailed legal notices page if need be, and don’t forget to add to a link to your contacts page so the reader can easily engage you for specific advice.

4. Failure to Integrate

The failure of law firm websites to present information in an integrated way.

Amongst other material, law firm websites typical have sections for: people, services, practice areas, articles and newsletters, and press releases.

Lots of firms say that they put people at the centre of what they do, that the quality of their people is the thing that sets them apart from the competition, yet they don’t manage to put people at the centre of the law firm’s website information architecture.

on the ideal law firm website design should enable you to find an article on a topic that interests you, find out which partner wrote it, see a press release outlining the particular matter being discussed, see other lawyers in the team, see the matters they worked on, choose the right person for your needs and hire them. The lawyer should be the thing that ties all the other information together.

5. Failure to Generate

The failure of law firms to use the website for lead generation by capturing contact information from visitors.

A good lead generation strategy allows you to collect information from pre-qualified interested people so that you can nurture them to become clients.

While publishing an email newsletter is fairly common, the topics are often too broad to be useful and it can be difficult to know what exactly your readers are looking for. Firms should consider publishing on a range of topics and asking visitors to subscribe only to the topics they are interested in. This approach is essential for large firms, but smaller ones will benefit from building a targeted mailing list too.

6. Failure to Innovate

The failure of law firm websites to find new ways to deliver and market their services.

Law firms are traditionally slower to innovate than businesses in other industries. There are very few firms offering truly innovative ways for clients to access their services. This could be because of the long standing rule that law firms must be owned and managed by qualified lawyers. This rule significant limits the opportunities for firms to attract the best talent in disciplines outside law, and also limits their ability to raise finance for costly infrastructure projects.

We expect to see a significant rise in the degree to which firms innovate as non-lawyer investors get involved in the running of firms as a result of the Financial Services Act coming into force in 2011/12.

7. Failure to Cultivate

This is a failure to nurture and encourage new talent to any great depth.

Taking the first steps towards a career in law can be a daunting prospect. Some firms are good at providing information for recruits of university age and older, but information is not so abundant for bright young people of school age, and older people thinking of a career change.
Mature recruits from other industries are frequently shown to add a richness to practice groups that helps them win business and deliver tangible benefits to their clients.

Targeting younger people could also be beneficial, enabling the firm to have some influence over the development of the talent pool in the future. Firm should invest in these groups with micro-sites and information services tailored to their particular needs.

Make Law Firm Events Hubs of Expertise

Client events have been a staple of the law firm marketing tool kit for years. In this briefing we look at how firm’s event managers can focus content, delivery, and marketing effort to position their offer as an essential business resource.

Times are tough and your clients are looking for guidance; leaders who will help them navigate through the storm and out the other side. 2009 is an opportunity to position your events (and by association your firm) as central to your customers business.  Offer help and support now, and you will win credibility and status that will stand you in stead when the good times inevitably return. Be relevant. Be consistent. Be a model of unrivaled customer service.

It’s painful to admit, but attendees actually get as much, if not more, benefit from interaction with each other as they do from your carefully crafted programme of talks and seminars.

Law firms that provide tools to facilitate these interactions will stand out as essential, while firms that treat attendees as a passive audience to be preached at will almost certainly die a slow and painful death.

Events as a Hub of Expertise

Successful events bring the right people together, and provide an infrastructure in which productive interactions thrive. Delegates, bonded by passion, commitment, and identification with the group’s expertise share their experiences and knowledge in free-flowing, and creative ways. Fee-earners hosting events have the opportunity to learn as much from the attendees as the attendees do from your lawyers.

Successfully making your law firm marketing event a hub of expertise, allows you to claim real business benefits. As a hub of expertise your event will help clients to: Solve problems, develop new capabilities, leverage best practices, standardise practices, make time-savings, increase talent, and avoid mistakes. In return, your staff gets deep insight into the real issues your clients are dealing with on the front line every day.

Creating a hub requires a subtle approach, and your efforts should be focused on providing the tools and infrastructure that makes interaction easy, rather than trying to force it directly. The rest of this briefing looks at the specific tools your law firm can provide to help things along.

Getting Started with Blogs

Starting conversations can’t be forced, but they do need seed content to get them started. The best source is the speakers at your event talking about the issues they will cover at the event proper. Giving speakers a blog and the freedom to write what they want opens the dialogue and gets the conversation flowing. Clients can be given access to the blog via a password protected area of your website before, during and shortly after the event. At a later stage access can be opened to the public at large to invigorate discussion and serve as a marketing tool for future events and the firm in general.

Social Networking

Networking can take place on a public level by allowing clients to post in forums and comment of blog posts, or privately between individuals and small groups. Part of the booking process can include the option to create a client profile that outlines each person’s skills, experience, and interests. This helps attendees to connect with like-minded individuals both at the event and beyond.

Client Generated Content

Give clients the opportunity to create and post content relevant to the event. You may be surprised how thoughtful the results can be. There will of course be some rubbish, but this can be easily solved with the implementation of a voting system that allows other delegates to rate the content. This results in poor content sinking out of view while content of greatest value rises to the top. Delegate generated content can take many forms, but could include photo galleries, text documents and video.