Larry Bodine Law Marketing Blog : Law firm marketing, legal editor, legal marketing, attorney marketing, business development, marketing consultant, legal consultant, business development

The CPA firm of Winter, Kloman, Moter & Repp is helping promote a local charity in their holiday mailings to clients. 

The firm had a coloring contest with one of its clients, Prevention and Protection of Abused Children. Marketing Manager Christina Steder turned the winning design into our design for gift tins, holiday cards, and gift tags. The back of the card talks about PPAC, and mentions that they're a client of the firm as a promotion for their not-for-profit services.

Winter, Kloman, Moter & Repp, S.C. is a full-service accounting firm based in Elm Grove and Oconomowoc, WI, with a staff of 53.  They provide auditing and accounting services, tax, management advisory and comprehensive personal financial planning. See www.wkmr.com on the Web.

"Law firms are tapping people who come from fields such as technology, accounting, consulting and investment banking. The trend is a further example of how law firms are embracing business practices that are common in the corporate world.

"As law firms grow bigger and must deal with issues like mergers and globalization, law firm managers want marketing ideas from professionals who have dealt with those issues elsewhere, said partners and marketers. The challenges of big firms "naturally leads law firm leaders to look across a broader set of industry options when they hire the next marketing parson," said Libby Chambers, the chief marketing officer at Bingham McCutchen LLP, a firm with foreign offices and which is the result of a merger in 2002. She joined the firm this year after being the No. 2 marketing and business development official at Bank of America Corp.

"Heller Ehrman White & McAuliffe LLP appointed a new chief marketing officer, William Morgan, within the last month, picking a candidate who spent time at both SBC Communications Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Morgan said there are parallels between law firms today and telecommunications companies after deregulation. Both rely on more aggressive marketing than in the past, he said.

"Law firms' value of their chief marketing officers is reflected in their salaries. Many command six-figure salaries as high as $400,000, said Gary Davis, a partner at law consultancy Patterson Davis Consulting in San Francisco.

"Some law firm managers said they reached outside the legal community for marketing help because they did not want someone drawing on conservative strategies that had been tried before. Before the 1990s, law firm advertising wasn't common. Now many firms engage in branding campaigns much like accounting or technology firms."

For the rest of the story see http://www.bizjournals.com/industries/business_services/legal_services/2004/11/29/sanfrancisco_story8.html 

Lucky are those who are on the holiday mailing list of Lionel Sawyer & Collins, a 70-lawyer firm in Las Vegas.

You get not a generic greeting card, not a branded tchotchke, nor a boring book on the history of the firm.

You get chocolate! The picture you see is the gold box full of choco goodies just before my wife and I inhaled the contents.  In case you forget where it came from as you are smacking your lips, it's embossed on each piece.  The big bar is milk chocolate, which I totally hogged.  The littler pieces are semi-sweet, a less desirable form of this delicacy, because to me, sugar is what it's all about.

The genius behind the holiday chocolates is Director of Marketing  Angela Spall, who knows a good thing when she eats it.  I know that other firms think about sending out embossed chocolate, but she actually does it, hence she deserves credit. (See "Lionel Sawyer Marks 35th Anniversary with Annual Review"at http://www.lawmarketing.com/pages/articles.asp?Action=Article&ArticleID=104.)

I hearken back to the words of Chicago marketer David Milberg, Director of Fun at Schiff Hardin & Waite.  (Yes, that's his real title.  See Chicago's Happy Law Firm Marketer).  "Start each day with a heavy dose of Vitamin Chocolate," he said. "Everyone loves chocolate," said said, handing out candy bars at a marketing event.

Would that all professional firms would learn at the knee of these wise marketers.

My longtime friend and colleague Jim Durham has surprised many of us by going in-house at the Ropes & Gray, one of Boston's oldest and largest law firms with 500+ attorneys.

Why did he do it? "After 8 years of working with hundreds of firms (and staying in 100's of hotels), it is a chance for me to work closer to home," Jim said.  "Most importantly, though, it is a chance for me to work with some of the finest lawyers in the world at an amazing law firm. The potential merger of Ropes with the premier New York-based Intellectual Property firm of Fish & Neave makes it even more exciting. The combination would will create a firm of approximately 700 lawyers."

Jim broke the news on the LawMarketing Listserv and in the Professional Marketing Newsletter (see http://www.lawmarketing.com/newsletter/November22,2004newsletter.html#articleseven)

Jim's fascinating career started as a practicing lawyer, then the first Marketing Director at Mintz Levin in Boston, then to being an all-star marketing trainer, to selling sponsorships for Major League Baseball, and back to consulting. At Ropes & Gray he'll head up a marketing team of 13 people.  You can reach Jim at 617.951.7975 and jdurham@ropesgray.com.

At the conference, I repeatedly had to grab a pen to write down notes on new ideas I was hearing.  Finally, I fired up my laptop and started typing because the info was coming in so fast. The conference was "Relationship Marketing and Business Development in the Professional Services Sector" on November 3 in New York.

It was jointly presented by the PM Forum, a global organization of 3,000 in-house marketers in the law, accounting and consulting fields (I'm the regional director for North America), and and the Business Development Institute, the leading provider of event-based business development programs to the professional services, technology, publishing and media industries.

Troy Waugh, CEO of the Rainmaker Academy in Nashville, gave the keynote speech, saying that the most important selling technique is listening. He described the five levels of listening:

1. Lowest: ignoring the speaker; this is downright insulting.  This is where the associate comes in and the partner never raises his head up from working at his desk.
2. Next from the bottom: pretend listening, like the time Troy's daughter said to him, "Mom just told me she wants to be cremated." And Troy answered, "Fine, get her hat and let's go."
3. Next: selective listening.  "It's as if you're listening to someone speak French and only catch the words you know," Troy said.
4. Second best: active listening.  We know this as taking in what the speaker says, and replaying back what you've heard.  This is very effective.
5. Best: empathetic listening.  "This is where you listen with your heart, and make people feel cared for."  This kind of listening brings in new business.

He also pointed out why clients leave professional firms:

• 7% leave because the price is too high.
• 15% leave because the quality of the work is not good enough.
• 68% leave because of the way they were treated.

Using your ears is more important than I'd ever heard.