Law Firm Marketing Consultant : Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog : Law firm marketing, legal marketing, attorney marketing, business development, sales training, practice development, training, marketing consultant, legal consultant, individual lawyer coaching, business development, client team, practice development, business development, law firm coach

The associate Rainmaker of the Year is Elizabeth L. Gunn, a bankruptcy lawyer serving closely-held businesses, their owners and executives. She works DurretteBradshaw PLC, an 18 lawyer boutique firm based in Richmond, Virginia. In 2009 – just her third year at the firm – she could point to originations worth a third of her billings, and 10-15 new clients for the firm, including several substantial ongoing clients.

But she faced two big disadvantages when she moved to Richmond: “I was young, just 23, and looked it. And I knew no one in the law.”

She handled the first issue by distinguishing herself as capable and someone who could be valuable to a client. Especially in early meetings, she worked a bit harder to show clients and other lawyers she could take responsibility and work competently.

As for the second, she took action zealously. According to Elizabeth, “Knowing no one meant I had to make new contacts and connect with the right people in the bar. I couldn’t just wait; I was forced to get out and meet people.”

These two solutions – distinguishing herself through valuable contributions for clients and others, and zealous building of her network – formed the core of her marketing success, a “machine for bringing in new business” according to her peers in Richmond.

Or maybe it was...for the rest of the story, please click here.

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Here is the list of LMA Your Honor first-place winners::

• Practice Development -- Sutherland Asbill & Brennan: Sutherland Business Development curriculum
• Media Relations: Mayer Brown
• Community Relations: Middleton Reutlinger – kindess public service advertising campaign
• Recruiting: Cadwalader Wickersham & Taft: recruiting microsite
• Chapter of the year (of 18 LMA chapters) - LMA Vancouver: “Changing the Rules”
• Marketing on a Shoestring: (maximum expenditure of $500) -- Morrison Foerster: Regulatory Innovation Award
• Best in show: (an entry that stood out from the rest, where a law firm took something and did everything they could possibly do to maximize it) -- Event by Fredrickson Bryon: “Lawyers & the Louvre” Campaign

Awards given on previous days of the convention, which ended today, are:

• Advertising (single ad): Bennet Jones – The Pink Ad
• Advertising campaign: McInnes Cooper – signal flag branding campaign.
• Events: Miller & Chevalier – inauguration invitation and website
• Website: Gesmer Updegrove -- www.gesmer.com
• Niche web site: Bingham McCutchen – Bingham Information Gateway
• Online Interactive Marketing Tools: Morris, Manning & Martin – MMM Social Media
• Electronic Media: Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman for New Faces of Energy: Insights from the Energy Revolution
• Identity: (logo and stationery)  Baker & McKenzie with zünpartners – branding a firm for growth
• Firmwide brochure: Bingham McCutchen – inSecurities practice brochure
• Annual report: Blank Rome “A Year Marked by Change”
• Announcements: Bingham McCutchen – Bingham-McKee Nelson Announcement
• Newsletter or Alert: Stikeman Elliott – Registration reform

 You can find the entire list of first, second and third-place winners by clicking here.

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Howrey is planning to oust up to 10 percent of its partners, a move that follows a year of disappointing revenue numbers.

Howrey is expected to cut between 25 and 30 partners, most of them in the United States, Legal Week reports. The decision to make the cuts was made before Christmas, according to the story. Both equity and nonequity partners will be let go.

Last month the law firm laid off 29 associates and 65 staffers from its 10 U.S. offices.

The move comes after Howrey saw a 35 percent drop last year in profits per equity partner and a 16 percent drop in revenue.Further evidence that the legal profession  is in a recovery economy arrives in a new report that layoffs at law firms are nearing zero.

Meanwhile, Darby & Darby, a 62-lawyer IP firm in New York, announced it would close. The decision follows a series of departures, as partners left to join general practice firms and failed attempts to merge with another law firm.

Legal Job Losses Drop Off Sharply

Howrey and Darby are the outliers in a major trend in the opposite direction.  As the national unemployment rate remained steady in February, the number of legal industry jobs lost dropped to one-tenth of what it had been in January, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' monthly jobs report.

The legal profession shed only 100 jobs in February — substantially fewer than the 1,100 jobs that it lost in January — according to the report, released Friday.

Those numbers represented the second significant monthly decline for the industry. The sector lost 2,100 jobs in December and 2,900 in November — a steep difference compared to the 5,800 lost in October. The industry has shed 37,100 positions over the past year, according to BLS statistics, which tally net job losses.

For further details, see Law360.

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The LMA today inducted 3 people into its Hall of Fame:

1.       Silvia Coulter of Hildebrandt Baker Robbins in Boston – she is a former CMO of three AmLaw 100 law firms, founder of LSSO. She has a book coming out this fall: Client Relationship Management for Associates, published by the ABA.

2.       Jim Durham, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer of McGuireWoods in Richmond, VA -- he was a former practicing lawyer, worked for Major League Baseball, former marketing director for Mintz Levin and later Ropes & Gray, was a marketing consultant, author of 3 books.

3.       Kevin McMurdo, CMO at Perkins Coie in Seattle – he was the 7^th president of LMA, a non-practicing lawyer and a former marketing consultant.

 

An LMA committee reviews hall of fame candidates and looks for people who must be a thought leader in advancing the legal profession, must be a mentors and must have served the LMA on the local or national level.

 

The LMA is continuing to issue Your Honor awards a few at a time. Here's the latest:

 

First Place Your Honor Winners

 

• Advertising (single ad): Bennet Jones – The Pink Ad
• Advertising campaign: McInnes Cooper – signal flag branding campaign.
• Events: Miller & Chevalier – inauguration invitation and website
• Website: Gesmer Updegrove -- www.gesmer.com
• Niche web site: Bingham McCutchen – Bingham Information Gateway
• Online Interactive Marketing Tools: Morris, Manning & Martin – MMM Social Media
• Electronic Media: Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman for New Faces of Energy: Insights from the Energy Revolution

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I haven’t been to an LMA meeting in 5 years, and this one in Denver is a very pleasant surprise.  Many longtime and senior members of the marketing profession were there. There is great networking – I barely made it 30 feet into the Hyatt Regency lobby when I immediately ran into people I knew.

There are 800 attendees at the LMA conference, according to conference co-chair Despina Kartson.  This is up from 530 last year. There are 190 CMOs and Marketing Directors here.

LMA is issuing the Your Honor Awards in batches.  Here’s the first batch of first place winners (like the early awards given out in the Oscars):

• Identity: (logo and stationery)  Baker & McKenzie with zünpartners – branding a firm for growth
• Firmwide brochure: Bingham McCutchen – inSecurities practice brochure
• Annual report: Blank Rome “A Year Marked by Change”
• Announcements: Bingham McCutchen – Bingham-McKee Nelson Announcement
• Newsletter or Alert: Stikeman Elliott – Registration reform

The new conference company is a great improvement.  Before the conference I got an email with a bar code in it.  I printed it out and scanned it upon registering at the hotel.  Instantly my information was prepared for me at a counter 10 feet away. The whole thing took 60 seconds.  Very innovative.

 

I think that a higher-level crowd is at this conference – I see more CMOs and Marketing Directors than in past conferences. One factor is that the full member registration fee is $1195, and it’s $1645 for non-member – so attending the conference has reached an expense level where attendance is not given out as a perk to marketing assistants, for example. With law firm cuts in budgets, it’s become a destination that only the CMO can justify.

 

Yesterday was the first ever pre-conference session for lawyers.  About 25 people attended, with the crowd growing to 40 by lunchtime.  The best received speakers were Alvidas Jasin (soon to leave Thompson Hine for a job at BTI Consulting), Jim Durham, CMO of McGuireWoods, and Rick Klau of Google.

 

Attendees were grumbling that there is no Wi-Fi at the conference, but I anticipated this and brought my plug in "skycard" that gets me online using a cell-phone connection.

 

The programs have better speakers this year too—more CMOs and marketing directors and fewer consultants at the podium.  I want to hear from the in-house marketers, because they’re the ones on the firing line.  Tomorrow is broken into 4 tracks: business of law, client service, business development, and public relations. 

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Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door, as 2010 Small Firm Rainmaker of the Year Christopher Marston knows well. He offers soup-to-nuts service to entrepreneurs and startup businesses. Originate! newsletter selected him because the revenues of his Boston law firm – Exemplar – saw its revenues shoot up 48% last year, when the rest of the legal profession stagnated in the Great Recession.

His business has succeeded by being different in a way that is highly desirable to clients. The 22-lawyer firm, led by four partners including Marston, who is still just in his early 30s, was founded in 2005 with the aim that it would “absolutely not bill by the hour.”  The firm was ahead of its time by offering value billing and a service guarantee from the start.  This approach plays very well in the current times of client rebellion, as exemplified by the Association of Corporate Counsel Value Challenge.

“We’re not a vendor, we’re a partner with a client,” Marston said. “And we call clients customers.”

In contrast, most large law firms charge by the hour and are built as legal silos.  Business advice and financing is something that is offered elsewhere.   “We practice at the intersection of law and business,” Marston said.  “We’re looking for clients like us.  We’re revolutionaries and we’re looking for revolutionaries.”

The target client of Exemplar law is...For the rest of the story please click here.

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Six additional law firms have retained Concep, a leading provider of integrated digital marketing solutions to law firms, representing 10 percent growth for Concep during Q1 2010. Among the new clients are

• Hunton & Williams
• Schulte Roth & Zabel
• Cole Schotz, a mid-sized firm.
• Downs Rachlin Martin, another mid-sized firm.
• Two other AMLaw100 firms.

The company works with professional organizations in the financial, professional and business services sectors, as well as membership organizations and marketing agencies to help them build, manage and deliver digital communication programs. Concep recently partnered with the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA), complementing their existing partnerships with LMA Metro New York, Bay Area and Toronto.

I use Concep myself for digital marketing, and they are superb.

"Concep’s strong start to the year is evidence of the growing demand for email and digital marketing," said Anthony Green, president of Concep. "We have capitalized on the growth better than most companies because we work hard to win and keep new business with unparalleled service, innovative products and a pricing model that drives significant ROI.” 
 
The Concep U.S. office launched three years ago at 11 Harrison Street in New York.  During that time more than 50 law firms and other businesses have retained Concep to handle their B2B marketing.  Concep also has offices in Sydney and London, which recently won two B2B Marketing awards in the categories of ‘best lead nurturing initiative’ and ‘best limited-budget campaign’.

Concep continues to make enhancements to its SaaS email marketing platforms and broaden their offerings as a full service digital marketing firm. For additional information, please visit www.concepglobal.com
 

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Join the video lawyer expert, New York Attorney Gerry Oginski together with me on Wednesday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day at Noon for an important look at how video marketing can differentiate you and prompt new clients to call you. Research has shown that you're 53 times more likely to get on the first page of Google's search results if you have video on your website.

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Click here to sign up for this event

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WHO SHOULD ATTEND: Lawyers in firms large and small who want to use modern web technology to give prospective clients what they're looking for: a video of the lawyer they're going to retain.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• Putting video on your law firm website can result in dramatic traffic increases and conversions of website viewers to callers.
• How and why video is so important to attorneys in today’s legal climate.
• Gerry’s 10 Commandments for using attorney video.
• Why video is the best way to communicate with your online visitors.
• Why video is the best return on investment you can make with your marketing dollars
• Learn how video develops trust with a non-trusting public.
• Learn why video is the best way to communicate with your online visitors.
• For more info visit http://www.pbdi.org/pages/events.asp?Action=View&EventID=237

In this one-hour webinar we guarantee you will learn how video makes you the logical choice for a viewer to call. Your goal is to make the phone ring and get more clients. Learn how using video.

Learn the 5 critical things you need to know when searching for a video production company. Also, learn why video is the best return on investment you can make with your marketing dollars.

"In this one-hour webinar I guarantee you will learn things you didn’t know about why creating video is so helpful to your potential clients and importantly, makes the phone ring." -- Gerry Oginski.

Register Now for the incredible low price of only $30.  You can't afford to miss this program!

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I can tell the economy for the legal industry is getting better when research shows that law firms are merging with each other without any slowdown.  Hildebrandt Baker Robbins reports that there were 57 completed law firm mergers in 2009.

The newest one is the merger of Benesch Friedlander Coplan & Aronoff LLP, with headquarters in Cleveland (plus offices in Columbus, Philadelphia, White Plains, Wilmington and Shanghai) with Dann Pecar Newman & Kleiman of Indianapolis, IN, effective March 1, 2010.  Because Benesch has 145 lawyers and Dann Pecar has 26, it's really an acquisition.

In an announcement, the firms say the merger would strengthen several of Benesch's core practice areas, particularly real estate, commercial litigation, bankruptcy, and their transportation/logistics and construction industry groups. Dann Pecar has promoted itself as a local leader in real estate, litigation, employment law, business and bankruptcy law.

The firm will do business as Benesch/Dann Pecar in the Indianapolis market as part of a national expansion plan by Benesch.

Interestingly, the consultant at Altman Weil who worked on the merger quoted statistics from AW's year-end MergerLine report, that the number of law firm mergers dropped by a significant 24 percent in 2009.  This is the opposite of what their arch-competitor Hildebrandt is saying in it's latest client advisory (see below):

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