Posted on 10 November 2011
At Isaac Parker, we generally advocate that digital marketing should be organised around practice groups and feature a high degree of fee-earner involvement. However, there are some things that absolutely must be managed centrally, ideally by a dedicated marketing department.
1. Overall marketing strategy
When marketing is decentralised as we recommend, there is a danger that it can become fragmented and pull the firm in conflicting directions. To counter this, practice group marketing should flow from a well-crafted central marketing strategy so that the activities of each practice group contribute to an integrated and coherent whole.
The central marketing strategy should set out clearly:
- How you will identify qualified clients
- Whether you are a value or volume firm and how you should target your marketing accordingly
- What services in your product portfolio are you focussing on and how they are different from competing firms
- What tools and tactics your firm will use
- Headline goals for growth and client satisfaction
2. Your Brand’s Visual Identity
Visual identities get stronger through consistent usage. We strongly advocate that the application of the firm’s visual identity be tightly controlled by the central marketing function. Marketing departments have the responsibility to ensure that sub-branded products can be created by practice groups, providing them with logos and branding tools where necessary. Marketing brand guidelines should provide a framework of rules to ensure an identity which is consistent with that of the main firm.
No fee-earning lawyer should ever be forced to do battle with technology. The purchase, implementation, and ongoing support of the technology needed to market a firm online should be managed centrally by support services.
4. Recruitment
For law firms, people are the product, and recruitment can be thought of as the first stage in the manufacturing process. Much like a confectioner might offer the public factory tours to demonstrate the quality of his product, the recruitment process acts as a powerful promotional tool for law firms. Obviously, the actual process of recruitment is the domain of human resources, but the way it is presented to the world at large is very much a marketing task. Are you presenting your firm in the right way by telling the world what you are looking for in new recruits?
In this series of introductory posts you have learned:
- How digital marketing has changed the game of advertising, allowing strategy to win over expenditure
- How simple but effective practice group-level marketing will guarantee you a consistent, measurable stream of new business queries
- How your law firm’s website and sub-website marketing strategies need to be managed centrally by the marketing department but fed down into practice groups for content
- How fee-earners need to contribute to marketing but how they can do this in a time and cost-effective manner
- How marketing departments can be most effective and which areas they should focus on
In the next collection of posts we will look at the steps you will need to go through to plan a digital marketing campaign for your practice group, starting with how to develop and define your product. We look forward to your questions will aim to answer them here and address them within the next series.
Posted on 7 November 2011
We spend a good deal of our time looking at law firms websites. As you would expect, we keep close tabs on what the big firms are up to, but smaller firms pique our interest frequently too. This week it was employment boutique CM Murray who grabbed our attention. Their use of Twitter is exemplary and you should take note.
CM Murray is a boutique firm specialising in “strategic employment and partnership advice” and we first became aware of the firm through Anna Birtwistle, an employment and discrimination lawyer at the firm.
The firm has at least five Twitter accounts: a corporate account for the firm and one for each lawyer, with managing partner, Clare Murray, leading from the front.
You can check out CM Murray’s five Twitter accounts here:
CM Murray use their account to provide followers with a stream of useful content by collating relevant tweets from the firm’s lawyers, but also forwarding useful information from other sources relevant to their specialism.
Law firms draw a lot of criticism for taking a broadcast approach and failing to engage online, but the way CM Murray run their account is entirely appropriate. Firms don’t converse, people do, and this is where the individual accounts come in to play.
The key to Social Media generally is that it gives an insight in to what you might be like to work with. CM Murray’s lawyers have it down to a pat. They are:
Expert
If you are tweeting for work rather than pleasure, you’d better know what you’re talking about and no opportunity for demonstrating expertise should be missed.
CM Murray tweet about the articles they have written and the places they are published, conferences attended and insights gathered. They also interact with the various professional bodies of which they are members.
Generous
The clue is in the name, but its amazing how many firms miss the social in social media and end talk only about themselves. CM Murray never fall in to this trap and a huge proportion of their tweets refer their followers to useful content from other providers, wherever they happen to find it online.
Being generous is not just a nice thing to do, it makes business sense as well. Just like in real life people help those that have helped them. Content and links are the currency of the web and people are more likely to share your content when they know you’ll help them too.
Personal
We’ve said it before, but it is worth repeating - social media gives people a sneak preview of what you might be like to work with.
The lawyers at CM Murray strike the balance just right, with a confident yet friendly style that is personable while staying on the right side of the personal/professional divide.
Polite
Check out the feeds of the CM Murray’s lawyers and you’ll see that they say thank you a lot. Simple manners go a long way and you should never take your followers attention for granted. If somebody mentions you or takes the trouble to share your content remember to thank you!
Leading from the front
Aside from having some very smart lawyers, I think a significant factor in the quality of CM Murray’s approach to Twitter is that their managing partner, Clare Murray, is firmly on board and leading from the front having been a Twitter user herself for almost 3 years.
It is great to find a small firm making such good use of digital marketing tools and CM Murray should be high commended. This is a great model for a boutique law firm, but practice groups in large firms could run their social media accounts this way too.
Posted on 3 November 2011
Your law firm’s website should be a great resource for your current and potential clients. Your website needs to really show your clients what your firm is all about and what the employees who work there stand for. They should start to feel they know what it would be like to work with you on a day-to-day basis and easily gain a clear understanding of where your experience lies and whether you are likely to be able to solve their problems.
A small firm or sole practitioner may be able to do achieve this through a well-planned content strategy, but large firms often struggle because they have a large and diverse client base. Large firms can find it difficult to deliver a focused message about who they are and what makes them different, and consequently end up sounding the same as their competitors. This leaves the client’s decision almost to chance, and who wants the future of their business based on chance?
The Multi-level approach
The solution is to separate out your large firm’s marketing goals and manage them at different levels of the business. The firm’s brand and reputation, along with recruitment and press relations should be managed centrally by the marketing department. This provides the platform from which more personal and specialised marketing programmes can be developed by the practice groups themselves.
Practice group marketing should focus on:
- Developing product
- Demonstrating expertise
- Building relationships.
This is in contrast to the brand-building objectives of the firm, which should be managed as aforementioned by the marketing department. Practice group marketing goals are best achieved by direct, personal, and tailored communications featuring high fee-earner involvement.
Opportunity vs. cost
Any activity that distracts lawyers from fee-earning will naturally meet resistance in most law firms because of the opportunity costs involved. Lawyers who are working on marketing aren’t billing clients or working towards billing clients, so the cost to the firm seems obvious. However, if your firm are going to rely on the fee-earner’s input into the marketing stratgey, it is clear that you need to be sure that you can reliably maximise the value of every moment spent. This means that the marketing tactics you ask them to deploy must be:
- Specific - clear about what needs to be done
- Measurable – to be sure your efforts are working
- Achievable - to guarantee participation
- Realistic - able to fit into the daily workload
- Time limited - so all involved are clear on their level of investment
A marketing machine
We hope that by reading these posts regularly, you will learn to develop a strategic digital marketing machine that delivers a consistent stream of new business enquiries for your practice group, thereby improving the brand of your firm as a whole. As always we welcome your questions and will answer them both here and within the series.
Posted on 27 October 2011
If you are responsible for marketing the services of a law firm, welcome to Thinking Thursdays, our series of blogs targeted specifically at helping you achieve your goal.
Over the coming weeks we aim to give you insight in to how we help law firm practice groups and boutique law firms market themselves online, while contributing to the brand and marketing activities of the firm as a whole. We hope you will gain valuable insight that will help you understand how to apply the tools and techniques to your own practice and develop your new marketing strategy.
As a marketer or senior manager, you will already be aware that marketing your firm consists of two steps. The first step is to locate an audience with the need for your services and the budget to buy them; the second is to craft your product with the right price and service to encourage your prospective client to become a confirmed buyer.
Reaching an audience
As we all know, the marketing game has changed dramatically in the digital age. Historically, to market your service to a large number of people, the firm would simply contact the appropriate newspaper, television channel, or industry journal and pay for access to their prospective clients in the form of adverts. It was a simple transaction where publicity was traded for cash and every contact with the audience began with the writing of another cheque.
However, outright advertising has always been and continues to be a rich man’s game. If we look at it simply, it is unlikely that anyone reading the Financial Times would see an advert for high-value legal services and call up to engage lawyers immediately. A firm needs to place many adverts over a long period of time just for the chance to embed their name in the subconscious of potential buyers. It continues to be an expensive tactic, and one whose effectiveness is difficult to measure until huge amount of funds have already been committed.
For law firms this has another downside. Lawyers are competing for advertising space with consumer brands and financial institutions who have command of significantly larger marketing budgets. In order to make the marketing spend go further, firms can focus on their brand as a whole, but have no hope of simultaneously advertising their specialised services such as niche practice groups‚ the very services which make their law firm unique and marketable.
Going Digital
The digital age has brought about many changes, but for marketers, two are particularly interesting. Firstly, control of the audience no longer lies solely in the hands of a few powerful corporations. The Internet and Google in particular, have democratised access to consumers’ attention so that compelling content, not hard cash, is the price you pay to take your share. Put simply, if your lawyers have the ability to regularly produce interesting and useful content that potential clients want to read, then you can help yourself to a huge audience without spending a penny.
The second change brought about by the digital age is in the speed and level of detail at which marketing effectiveness can be measured. We have the ability using cheap tools and simple techniques, to track the interactions potential clients have with your firm, from the moment they first hear about you right up to the day they place their first order. With type of data at your disposal, you need never waste your efforts or budget on an ineffective campaign again.
Making it work
Building brands and awareness of the firm as a whole are important tasks and it is essential that law firm marketing departments focus their attention here. But here lies the problem ‚ where does that leave the practice group head, responsible for growing business in a particular area but without the support of a dedicated marketing professional?
The answer lies in focused, content-led, digital marketing strategies at the practice group level. Given proper training, lawyers can build independent, and highly effective digital marketing practices for the practice group, that will deliver a consistent stream of new business enquires with just a few hours. All you need is a little effort from each lawyer per week and help from an expert guide, which Isaac Parker can provide you with.
Continue reading our series of upcoming blogs as we will tell you how your law firm practice groups and boutique law firms can effectively market themselves online while contributing to and benefiting from the brand and marketing activities of the firm as a whole. We welcome your questions in the meantime and will answer them both here and within the series.
Posted on 3 August 2011
Integrated Marketing, Practice Groups, Social Media, Thought Leadership
This is the second post in a six part series which looks at how success in digital marketing for law firms is achieved by matching tools and techniques to the personality of each individual in a team.
For me the law is more a calling than a job. I love the intricacies and details of my practice area and although I enjoy clients I have to admit that I often study just for the love of it. The book I wrote on my practice area is considered the leading text on the subject and you would find a copy on the desk of all our competitors - a thought that always make me smile!
My opinion is sought far and wide and I am regularly published in the leading publications for our industry. Although I am not a natural networker, I am well-known within my specialism and at conferences people often come looking for me. Because of this I’ve built quite an extensive address book.
Although I have a lot of contacts, I would feel quite uncomfortable reaching out to people I don’t know well without a good reason. I see marketing as a necessary evil rather than something I really want to engage with, but I do get an enormous sense of achievement when my work spreads. If marketing can help my work reach a wider audience I would probably put a bit more effort in.
Strategies for Thought-leaders
Newsletter
Newsletters are the primary tool of the thought leader. Start by emailing your extensive contact list explaining that you are going to start publishing a monthly newsletter and ask if they would like to receive it. Create a mailing list from all those that say yes. In marketing we call this a “permission asset” but you might like to think of it as a nice way to ensure that those you send your newsletter to really want to read it.
Try to plan your newsletters for the year ahead and write them in your diary. Include the topic of each article and give yourself a target word-count. You may like to write a skeleton outline for each newsletter too, this will give you a head start and help you keep to your schedule even if you find yourself suddenly busy with client work or other responsibilities.
Blogs
Many of the thought leaders we work with have trouble making the transition from writing books and long articles to the typically shorter form of a blog post. We encourage you to think of a blog as a form of sketch book. It is a place to write and develop ideas which might later become full articles, perhaps combined with several other post on a similar topic. They are a great way to get feedback on you thinking and they a very effective way of optimising your website for search engines.
Social Media
Thought leaders can make good use of social media as a broadcast medium. Don’t worry about engaging you followers too much initially; you are an expert and it is OK to be a little aloof. Focus on creating compelling content that other people will want to spread. If you have conversationalists or avid networkers in your team, ask them to help get your material out in the wider world. Services like Twitter can also be useful for monitoring your industry and providing ideas to inspire your writing.
Working with Others
If you are marketing a firm alone, choose the tools that suit your personality and pour your effort in to using them the very best way you can. However, you can multiply your own efforts and those of members of your team by working together.
Working with Presenters
Presenters need material and thought-leaders produce material. Share your content with presenters in return for subscriptions to your newsletters and credit that will help to raise your profile. Presenters can also be a good source of customer feedback that can help you write material that meets customer needs.
Working with Conversationalists
Of all the personality types, the conversationalist is closest to the customer. Conversationalists can use your content to start a discussion and can return valuable client feedback and ideas for new content based on the real concerns of the market.
Working with Veterans
Veterans are a rich source of contacts and can usefully help to build an audience for your material. Someone who has been around for a while may also be able to give historical context, adding richness to your work.
Working with Rainmakers
Rainmakers are always making contact with potential clients and your content gives them an excuse to pick up the phone. Opportunities that don’t result in an immediate sale can be added to your mailing list, increasing the likely hood of future in-bound enquiries.
Posted on 2 August 2011
Integrated Marketing, Practice Groups, Social Media
The secret to choosing the right marketing tactic for your legal practice is to go with whatever technique you fancy. Commit to it, and sustain it over a long period of time, and success will almost certainly follow.
Whatever method you choose you’ll find hundreds of very wealthily lawyers who’ve built their practices on it. This evidence, though not very scientific, suggests that the merits of any particular tactic matter less than the degree to which it plays to your own particular strengths.
We’ve written profiles for five kinds of legal marketer, and we’ll be publishing them every day this week. Watch out for the posts over the next five days and see which one you identify with most. Once you’ve chosen a profile, follow the advice to choose a digital marketing tactic that best suits your personality.
So who will you be:
We’ll link this list up to the corresponding post as each profile goes live.
Posted on 4 July 2011
Branding
Law firms may wish to take steps to ensure their brand is protected from being associated with adult material, a possible risk posed by the imminent introduction of the new .xxx top-level domain.
A new domain name .xxx is due to be released in September as the primary top-level domain name for the adult entertainment industry. The registry in charge of this domain has agreed to allow registered trademark holders to ‘block’ domains corresponding to their trademark so that they may not be used for adult entertainment purposes.
Applications to block a domain will be accepted from 7th September and applicants must be able to prove ownership of a registered trade mark. Although we explored the documentation in detail, we have not yet been able to establish whether this needs to be a US trademark.
Full details of the timeline for implementation of the new domain are available at about.xxx, which at the time of writing is safe for viewing at work.
If you have any questions about how this might affect your firm, please post in the comments and we will do our best to help.
Posted on 28 June 2011
Innovation, Integrated Marketing, Social Media
I was really excited when I saw a tweet pop up on the Legal Week feed that announced: “Mishcon de Reya launches three digital TV channels http://t.co/aEPmYLD”. As last, I thought, a large law firm sticking their neck on the line and doing the work that matters. How wrong could I be.
Back in 2010, I wrote an article called Law Firm Social Media, in which I set out a model for law firms that would allow them to capitalise on the currency of the modern internet - attention. I suggested that instead of spouting out marketing cliches, firms should focus their attention on creating compelling content that other people would want to share. I suggested that video was one of the best way to do this and even provided a sketch layout that firms could adapt for their own uses. Mischon’s new ‘Digital TV channels’ could have been like that.
Mischon de Reya have decided to implement their TV channel in partnership with yourBusinessChannel.com. The format is blog style with short clips from a wide variety of business personalities. There are some seriously high-profile people giving tips and advice on a range of business issues. All the videos are tagged by subject, company, and person and the clips can be filtered by clicking on the categories names. So far so good.
We all know that a good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. We need to have the scene set for us in the form of an introduction and we need a summary to helps us consolidate what we have just learned. The Mishcon’s effort gives us only the middle. The clips dive straight in to a topic without giving us the wider picture and, as viewers, we have to work hard just to understand what we are seeing. A TV channel should be a curated experience. We need an Evan Davis to pull it all together.
Obviously running a TV channel is not part of most law firm’s core business and Mishcon’s effort should be viewed in that context. Marketing budgets don’t stretch to hiring high-profile BBC presenters or long days in the edit suite stitching videos together. There needs to be a compromise that respects the operational needs of the firm’s marketing budget but still brings value to viewers.
Mishcon’s have made some attempt to organise clips into distinct channels: Deal and Dealmakers, Digital Economy, and London Influence, but I think they need to go further. Although it may be too expensive to edit the clips into a single cohesive film, ‘programmes’ could be made by creating pages that hold groups of clips which together tell a story. Lawyers could be set the challenge of curating videos from those available and producing written narrative that explains how they work together. This result of this human involvement would be a true expression of the firm’s expertise and deliver real value to viewers.
Dumping content on an audience without explanation reduces it to data. Law firm marketing should deliver knowledge, value, and intelligent insight, for which there is no shortcut. Congratulation to Mishcon’s for trying something new, but now it is the time to do the hard work of turning a good idea, and a bold move, into a great one.
Posted on 22 June 2011
Integrated Marketing, Mobile, Practice Groups
North East law firm Dickinson Dees has just launched a new iPhone app aimed at HR professionals. Although several firms have launched iPhone apps over the past year or so, we believe the new app from Dickinson Dees is the first from a large firm to be aimed at a commercial audience.
Downloading the App
The app is available free from the iTunes store here or by searching for “HR Alert” on the App Store.
Features
The app splits content into three categories:
Calculators
A calculators section provides tool for working out maternity, paternity, and adoption leave, and statutory redundancy entitlements.
News
The news section delivers a selection of news articles by the firm as well as links to news stories of interest on third-party websites.
Directory
The directory gives gives the contact details for partners and directors in the employment team. There is also a directory of all the firm’s heads of teams and a third one giving easy access to maps and contact details for each of the firm’s five regional locations.
First Impressions
Resources in any business are finite and there is a lot to be said in reducing a features set to the point where a high quality product can be delivered. It seems that Dickinson Dees have taken this approach with their HR Alert app and the results is a fairly well polished app for the iPhone.
Closer Inspection
We tried the calculators first and were greeted with a sure-fire sign that we were using a law phone app - the obligatory disclaimer - which requires you to scroll through two screen of text and then click a button marked ‘I understand’. We do indeed understand that an app is no substitute for professional advice, but we’re pretty sure this information could be brought to our attention in a more elegant way.
Once past the disclaimer, the calculators ask you for some basic information about the employee’s situation. After clicking the calculate button, a timeline of important dates is display on screen. Interestingly, there is a lot more useful information available but users need to click a very small button in the top right of the screen in order to access it. Clicking the button flips the screen over to reveal a few pages worth of guidance relating to the way the calculation were made. The is useful information and we are surprised it isn’t made more prominent.
The news section presents headlines in a list format and is easy to use. A marker to the left of each headline indicates whether the story has been read yet on this device, making easy to identify new stories. Clicking on a heading takes you to the full story, or in the case of third-party articles, links through to the article elsewhere on the web.
At the time of this review, the most recent article was published over 2 weeks ago. Apps of this nature are most valuable when they are regularly updated, and we’d advice Dickinson Dees to ensure they have an effective content strategy in place to stop the app going stale.
The directory section is a useful addition and may help to drive some leads to the firm. We would like to see the app make it easier to find lawyers by specialism as those who are new to the phone would find it difficult to pick an individual to find their needs. This would not only help potential client, but organising lawyer by specialism also helps to demonstrate the range of issues the firm can help with.
Further Development
Dickinson Dees have made a good effort at building a simple iPhone app with high production values and useful content. Given that the firm has just relaunched it’s we’d like to see tighter integration and opportunities for generating leads and building a relationship with users. An example would be to offer an enhanced set of calculators to users who sign up on the firm’s website. Building a fan-base of anonymous users may well help to build brand recognition and get the firm on to client’s short list, but building direct relationships with named individuals is likely to results in a higher conversion of users into paying clients.
Posted on 17 June 2011
Design Planning, Innovation
Many of the newest and most exciting development in digital communications emerge through consumer markets and it can be difficult to know when and how to apply them in the corporate environment commercial law firms operate in.
By maintaining an systematic innovation pipeline, law firms can ensure they keep ahead of the market while avoiding expensive mistakes that arise from investing in cutting edge technology that may turn out to be a nothing more that a fad. In this post I’d like to share a model you can use to make sure your pipeline keeps your firm ahead of the curve.
1. Awareness building
Build an maintain a list of emerging technologies and concepts. We recommend a simple glossary style list that can be shared as a resource for every member of the firm. Ideas will typically be added to the list as soon as the emerge and usually before they have reached any market.
2. Repurposing
Monitor for signs of emerging technologies hitting the market place. Task your best thinkers with writing short proposals for how to repurpose these new ideas to meet the needs of law firms and their clients. At this stage, proposals should be written with an open-mind and do not necessarily need to be completely realistic.
3. Evaluate
As new technologies show signs of success, add a dose of realism to the ideas generated in stage 2 and work out the challenges that would need to be overcome in order to bring them to life.
4. Prototype
As new technology prove market appeal, develop prototypes that apply the technology to the law firm setting. If you have followed the pipeline this far you should be months if not years ahead of most other law firms who only to considering ideas at this stage. Circulate prototypes internally to gather feedback.
5. Realise
Successful prototypes can be shared with the firm and presented for approval. It is easier to build consensus when you have something for people to interact with, rather that asking them to sign-up to vague concepts. Those that gain approval can be launched as new products and services.
6. Monitor and Review
Establish goals and work out how to monitor success. Review new services weekly to begin with tapering to monthly or quarterly as they become more established.
7. Refine or Withdraw
Refine ideas when your review process shows they are no longer meeting the needs of clients or other stakeholders. Kill ideas quickly when their cost is greater than the earned benefits they achieve. Cost saving made by withdrawing under-performing services can be invested back into product development.
Posted on 26 April 2011
Analytics, Integrated Marketing
The goals feature of Google analytics lets you track actions that visitors complete as they navigate around your website. If your law firm is interested in measuring and improving the performance of your website, then setting up goals in Google Analytics is a very good place to start.
If you were running an e-commerce website, choosing your goals would be simple - you’d track completed transactions. However, as most commercial law firm don’t sell anything from their websites, the goals you choose to track will be somewhat different.
Below is a list of our top 5 goals that every law firm should track to help them measure the effectiveness of their site.
1. Contact form submissions
Law firm websites should drive enquires from prospective clients. Measuring successful contact form submissions helps you monitor whether your site is achieving this basic goal.
2. Mailing list subscriptions
A large portion of future business comes from your mailing list. Tracking subscriptions helps you discover what types of content are most likely to encourage visitors to sign up.
3. Report downloads
Original research and sponsored reports are costly and time-consuming to produce. Monitoring their reach will help you work out which initiatives are worth your investment.
4. Recruitment applications
It is often said that a law firm is only as good as it’s people. Recruitment marketing, especially for graduates, can eat up huge budgets. Measuring submitted applications and how they find you can help you spend your recruitment budget more effectively.
5. Deep visits
Visitors stay longer and access more pages on sites that provide engaging content. Google Analytics lets you setup a goal that is triggered when a visitor has browsed a predefined number of pages.
Google Analytics has an excellent support site, with detailed instructions for setting up goals on your account. You can access Google Analytics help site at http://www.google.com/support/analytics/
Posted on 15 March 2011
Marketing Research, Social Media
The UK has a lively and thriving legal community on Twitter, but if you are new to the social network it can be difficult to know who to follow. We used FollowerWonk to build a list of UK Lawyers and Law Firms who might interest you.
The list is not exhaustive nor is it completely accurate. Individuals who decide not to mention their profession in their biography are not included, and some overseas users will have slipped through the net, especially where their listed location is named after a UK city. Despite it’s short-comings, it does paint an interesting picture of Twitter use among UK lawyers and law firms and offers a good starting point for new users.
Access the complete list here
A list of lawyers and law firms on Twitter
Method
Followerwonk is an online service that lets you build lists of Twitter users by searching the name, location, and biography sections of their Twitter profile. We searched for the following terms in combined with the names of the countries and major cities in the UK:
- lawyer
- solicitor
- barrister
- attorney
- paralegal
- counsel
- QC
- GC
- law student
- law school
- legal practice
- law firm
- law tutor
Posted on 23 February 2011
Branding, Practice Groups
Law firms almost always structure their identity in the same way - using one name and a single visual system throughout. Amongst large firms I can’t find a single example where this isn’t the case.
It strikes me as odd that nobody has tried an alternative structure, especially given the convention for organising firms in to departments and practice groups. These self-contained business units tend naturally to develop a culture and identity quite separate from that of the firm as a whole and perhaps there is an opportunity to capitalise on those difference by developing alternative ways to structure their brands
In Wally Olins on Brand
the author gives us three structures that large organisations typically use to organise their business units. We’ve redrawn law firm specific versions of his diagrams below.
Monolithic Identity
A monolithic identity structure is the status quo for law firms. Businesses use one name and a single visual system across all business units. Monolithic structures are perhaps the easiest to manage and each business unit contributes toward the value of the brand as a whole. The converse is also true where a failing in one business unit can have a substantial impact on the whole group.
Endorsed Identity
Companies forming a group are perceived either by written or visual endorsement to be part of that group. We occasionally see this approach taken in relation to marketing and information products produced by law firms, but rarely is anything other that the firms main identity used in relation to service delivery.
Branded Identity
In organisations that take a branded approach the identity of the parent organisation is dispensed of completely and each business unit has a visual identity designed to appeal to its own target market specifically. It would be very interesting to see a large law firm move towards this model. Given that PEP is often very high among small specialist firms, I think there is strong potential for individually branded practice groups to become little profit power-houses, especially given the reduced overheads and resource sharing that comes with being part of a large organisations.
Posted on 30 January 2011
In-house Lawyers, Marketing Research, Social Media
When I worked at Big Law LLP, one of my responsibilities was the acquisition and distribution of client marketing research. Despite being personally responsibly for blowing thousands on the stuff, I can’t ever remember reading an insight that I couldn’t have worked out with a colleague on the back of an envelope. I’d hand over the corporate credit card details in return for a password enabling me to download several thousands words and a few pie charts that almost always concluded along the lines of “do more and charge less”. Hardly the earth shattering insight our partners were hoping for.
On particularly slow days, I used to imagine my perfect market research report. I say report, but it probably wouldn’t be a report at all. It certainly isn’t some crappy password-protected PDF report that the senior partner can’t even work out how to open. There is no executive summary, no methodology, no pie charts, and no reams of appendices. My perfect client research is personal and transparent and it comes straight from the horses mouth. It goes a little something like this:
About once a week, General Counsel at a leading FTSE 100 company writes to tell you exactly what is on his mind. He writes about what he likes about external lawyers and what he wants to change different. One week, for example, he’d write to tell you that he always hires lawyers, not law firms, and you’d be able to plan your campaigns accordingly. Another week he’d write and tell you that it would really make a difference to his relationship if you’d hire legally qualified account managers to look after his account, instead of the out-dated notion of the client partner. On this occasion he wouldn’t just float the idea and leave you to figure the rest for yourself, he’d actually list the pros and cons for your consideration, and spell out how to make a decent profit. His letters are full of the sorts of insights you could build a marketing plan around. Sounds valuable doesn’t it? But it doesn’t stop there.
Although interesting, one man’s view isn’t really scientific enough to bet the firm on, so our ever helpful advisor also circulates his views to a raft of other GCs. These lawyers are not only from his own employer, but also at other large companies with whom you’d almost certainly like to do business. Over the course the next week this team of busy, experienced, intelligent, and commercially astute in-house lawyers will debate the issues, documenting their discussion verbatim for your benefit. You can dip in at any time, and even ask questions if you feel so inclined.
How much would your firm be willing to pay for a subscription to such a service? £100k perhaps?
It sounds like a fantasy, but it already exists and those that take part don’t pay a penny for it. Leading in-house lawyers are blogging, and tweeting, and engaging with each other and the firms that serve them. It is a genuine opportunity, but so many big firms are missing out through shear ignorance. Reach out and engage with these people. Don’t try to sell to them or spam them with updates, but listen and respond to what the have to say. Invest in these relationships and you’ll never have to buy another crappy client marketing research report again.
I’ll try to maintain a list of in-house lawyer web presences on this page. The entry criteria is to have both a blog and active twitter account. Please let me know in the comments if you know of someone I should add.
UK In-house Lawyers
Tim Bratton
http://legalbrat.blogspot.com/
@legalbrat
Melanie Hatton
http://in-house-lawyer.blogspot.com/
@in_house_lawyer
Tom Kilroy
http://gcseyeview.blogspot.com/
@kilroyt
Anon
http://legalbizzle.wordpress.com/
@LegalBizzle
Posted on 11 January 2011
Branding, Integrated Marketing, Microsites, Practice Groups
Yesterday saw the launch of yet another tech law microsite, this time by international law firm Taylor Wessing. The site is part of an integrated campaign that includes a dedicated Twitter account and sponsorship and content syndication to a new section of The Guardian newspaper’s website.
DownLoad, the name Taylor Wessing has chosen for it’s new site, is entering a crowded space and the firm will face stiff competition. Notable examples include Pinsent Mason’s OUT-LAW.com service which, having been established for over 10 years, has grown beyond all reasonable definitions of a microsite.
The launch got us thinking about what it takes to launch and profit from a practice group microsite. The following post is our thought on the steps firms need to take to ensure they get maximum return from their investment.
1. Stay Focussed
The aim of a practice group microsite is to promote and stimulate interest in a single area of the firm’s expertise. It is, by definition, and exclusive activity and that is the precise reason that such sites are effective. Don’t be tempted to let other practice areas encroach on your patch. Unless the content is directly related to your subject area, it belongs elsewhere.
2. Think like a publisher
Most lawyers are experts at producing content. Many can rattle off a briefing here and a summary there without even breaking a sweat. The problem is that, left to their own devices, lawyers often produce content that is skewed toward personal preference or the educational imperative of whatever matter they happen to be working on at the time. Publishers approach things differently. In order to stay in business a publisher and turn a profit he must asks the market what it wants and then produces content to meet that need. Think like a publisher and ask what your readers want before you sit down at the keyboard.
3. Work hard on the branding
The branding of a practice group microsite is a delicate act. Balance must be struck between the competing requirements to be in keeping with the brand of the firm while developing the microsite as a destination in it’s own right. Even grass-roots efforts built by lawyers themselves should seek advice on how the design of the microsite will impact the brand of the wider firm.
4. Integrate campaigns
As a rule, marketing campaigns have a multiplier effect on each other. That is to say that two or more campaigns run in support of each other will almost alway out-perform the same number of campaigns run in isolation. Microsites are the perfect tool to put at the heart of an integrated campaign being both a destination and a source of referrals. They should provide a landing site for press adverts, social media activity, and pay-per-click advertising and refer visitors to your branded research, events and main website.
5. Provide next steps
The purpose of a microsite is not to build a readership for the sake of the numbers. Every single page should have clear next steps that visitors can take in order to develop a deeper connection. Commonly called ‘calls to action’ these next steps might include: tools to share content, an email subscription form, event registrations, links to sponsored research, and invitations to make contact.
Posted on 4 January 2011
Design Planning
You can spend hours crafting and refining the aims and objective for your firm’s new website, but when it comes down to it, there are only five that really matter:
Increase the number of enquiries
How many of the people who visit your new site go on to make contact to discuss engaging the firm?
Increase the quality of enquiries
Does the new website deliver enquiries from people who meet your criteria for an ideal client in terms of budget, authority to purchase, need for services you offer, time frame and cultural fit?
Increase number of enquiries converted to clients
Of the enquiries that meet your quality criteria, how many then go on to actually engage the firm’s services?
Increase revenue per client
Are new clients spending more money with your firm since the new website went live?
Increase client loyalty
Is client turnover reduced?
