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

One thing that brings out the competitive nature of CMOs and marketers everywhere is the desire to score high on the numerous law firm rankings that are published.   Being named No. 1 as a corporate dealmaker or litigation firm is a huge marketing coup -- even making the top 10 of rankings like the AmLaw 100 are sought-after goals.

On the other hand, marketers must grind through the laborious chore of compiling information for directories, some of which are created simply to sell advertising.

You can tune in to an all-star webinar on Tuesday, May 6, 2008 (that's tomorrow) starting at Noon EDT "Blood, Sweat & Tiers: Who are the winners and losers in the battle for lawyer rankings?" They'll cover the proliferation of legal guides, directories, listings, and rankings that marketers must deal with.

Brought to you by WestLegalEdcenter, the cast includes:

• Fiona Boxall, Managing Editor, Chambers & Partners
• Joseph Calve, Chief Marketing Officer, Proskauer Rose LLP
• Deborah McMurray, CEO, Content Pilot
• William White, Publisher, SuperLawyers
• Jonathan Asperger, Principal, Asperger Partners LLC

Click here to get your seat at Blood, Sweat & Tiers:  Who are the winners and losers in the battle for lawyer rankings?

This no-holds-barred discussion will answer:

• Which, if any, of the rankings have value, and why?
• What do buyers of legal services really think about rankings?
• Does the proliferation of legal guides and directories bring clarity to process of selecting outside lawyers, or muddy the waters?
• How can lawyers and their firms get the rankings they deserve and, once received, leverage them in the marketplace?

West LegalEdcenter is an online source for continuing legal education (CLE) programs and business-oriented legal courses for large firms and corporations to solo practitioners and paralegals.

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Bingham McCutchen’s 2007 branding campaign proved to be the big winner at the 2008 Legal Marketing Association Your Honor Awards. Bingham earned first place awards for branding identity and advertising, and second place recognition for web site design at the LMA National Conference in Los Angeles. Earlier in 2008, Bingham secured nine regional LMA awards, six from the New England chapter in Boston and three from the Bay Area chapter in San Francisco.

Among the many winners was Bingham’s Bear and Baby ad was also named Law Firm Ad of the Year by The Wall Street Journal Law Blog and was featured on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” with host Stephen Colbert reiterating his well-known fear of bears and calling Bingham “the No. 2 threat to America.”

Bingham Director of the Office of the Chair and Firmwide Marketing Tracee Whitley and Bingham Creative Director Don Easdon offer the insiders’ view on building an award-winning branding campaign.  Read about it only on the LawMarketing Portal at www.LawMarketing.com.

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Ballard Spahr Andrews & Ingersoll has hired veteran journalist Debra Nussbaum to be a full-time client interviewer.

She has more than 30 years of newspaper reporting experience, beginning her career at The Minneapolis Star, then writing about real estate for The Philadelphia Inquirer and about schools for The New York Times.

She started in the firm's Philadelphia office six weeks ago and is just now starting to meet with clients in what firm Chairman Arthur Makadon calls candid interviews in which the clients can talk about what type of service they are getting, any problems that have arisen and what needs to be done better.  Kudos to Law.com for breaking the news.

Ballard Spahr, with more than 500 lawyers and eleven offices, had an outside company handle client relations work and found the information gathered to be invaluable, he said. "Too often we were just not aware of what our clients were thinking," he told Law.com. "That can lead, over time, to an erosion of the client relationship."

While Nussbaum, who is not a lawyer, may be accompanied to some of the meetings by lawyers in the firm, Makadon said it would never be with any lawyers who work with the client being interviewed.  He said the firm is just interested in hearing how the client perceives the relationship, whether the firm agrees or not. He said it is important that the firm not try to defend itself in these meetings but just listen to the feedback.

Ballard Spahr will initially focus on the firm's 300 or so top clients for the first round of interviews. Makadon said they are the clients in which multiple firm lawyers are involved in several different practice areas so that the firm gets feedback from several different people within the client organization.  

From an industry perspective, this is great news for the marketing profession. Client interviewers are a perfect extension of the marketing function, not a replacement.  Gathering data about clients is what marketing is supposed to be all about.

The issue will be whether the lawyers take the client feedback seriously and respond to client wishes.  Nothing is worse than asking a client's opinion and then ignoring it.

Best of luck, Debra!

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"I think how we market ourselves deserves to be re-examined. Marketing is about getting noticed, in a good way. Traditional marketing is no longer effective; people rely on it only because it's familiar," wrote Ernie the Attorney, a/k/a Ernest Svenson of New Orleans.   Right on, brother.

The issue came up because he had just made up new business cards. He decided to make them different.

"A few years ago, when I was still working for the large law firm, I jokingly had some 'Ernie the Attorney' cards made. Whenever I ran into people who knew me from this blog I gave them this card on the left (click on it to enlarge it). The black & white photo is what used to appear on the banner of this weblog, so it was sort of a 'branding' thing."

"People loved the card, and always made a big deal about it. They wanted to know where the picture was taken (the Metro in Paris) and if I had taken it (yes). It seemed like the card had 'special powers' because it always created a small buzz. Soon I started giving these cards to everyone, even folks who didn't know I had a blog. Same result."

"When I started my solo practice, I still felt obliged to have traditional business cards. I couldn't say why exactly. I thought maybe for when I needed to give contact information to, say, a court reporter. This card here (pictured left) is the result: it had my phone number, email address, physical address, fax number and so forth. And I think we can agree that it's pretty dull."

"I found that if I gave my 'Ernie the Attorney' card to one person in a group and my business card to another person, the latter would feel cheated and ask me if they could have one of the 'special cards.'

Recently he updated his blog design with a photo of the skyline of New Orleans. He decided to use the same photo for his business cards.

"I decided to re-examine the whole business card concept. What exactly do I want my business card to do? First, I want it to be cool enough that people still find it interesting when I give it to them. That's the most important thing. And it would be best if I present the same 'brand image' as my websites."

Frankly, if people want to find me all they have to do is Google 'ernie attorney' or 'ernest svenson' and they'll find all the information they need. Even if I didn't have a business card, it would be easy for people to contact me if they wanted to. My business card should encourage them to contact me, and I've learned that traditional business cards don't do much in the way of 'encouraging.'

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Suzanne Lowe, author of the Expertise Marketing Blog, is conducting another one-minute survey for her upcoming book. The title of this survey is "How well do Marketing and Business Development work with other operations, like Finance, IT, HR, Legal and more?"

Increasingly, Marketing / BD leaders seek ways to add new value by partnering with their colleagues in HR, IT, Finance, Legal, and more. Yet often these collaborations are simply “good ideas” forged by proactive people. Typically, these collaborations are not organizationally supported by incentives, rewards, recognized shared accountabilities or co-developed job descriptions.

In the increasingly competitive professional services marketplace, are these “good ideas” good enough?

Take her super-short survey to find out how your firm compares to other firms at creating formal working relationships between Marketing, Business Development and other operational functions. She'll give you a chance to see the results before anyone else. (Later, she'll post the results on the Expertise Marketplace™ blog and The Marketplace Master™ newsletter.)

Take our short survey

Many thanks,

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The scales are shifting in professional services marketing. The days when it sufficed to perform ‘marcomm’ activities – like brochures, advertising, public relations, firm events and branding – have passed. Today there is pressure on marketers to show return on investment.

In short, marketers must move from the ‘expense’ side of the ledger to the ‘revenue’ side.

Adding urgency is the fact that the US (and soon the world) is in a recession – consumer spending is down, unemployment is up, home prices are down, oil prices are near an all time high and the war in Iraq is wasting billions.“We are in a recession right now – it’s pretty obvious,” said Sara Kraeski, Director of Business Development of Davis, Graham & Stubbs in Denver, at a recent conference.

Partners today don’t want to know how much your project costs, they want to know how much it will earn. Smart marketers are changing their focus to business development activities:

• Advising teams going on tender competitions and beauty parades.
• Developing proposals that win new business.
• Identifying targets for clients to pursue.
• Helping professionals write personal business development plans.

Coaching is the single best activity in which to be proficient.The good news is that ‘BD’ is a learnable set of skills, and the abilities that make a top professional – being a good listener, analytical, expert questioners, organized and hard-working – are the same skills of those of top salespeople.

You as the marketer must help the professionals write business development plans.The priorities of the plans are pursuing clients first, then referral sources, next becoming visible in a business organization and finally targeting business executives. It’s all about relationships – the more a professional has, the more clients he or she will have.

First you’ll need support from the top. Announce to firm management that you have a plan to increase its revenue significantly. That will get their attention.Then explain that you will work with the fee earners who have the most potential (not the new associates or the 40-year old ‘service partners’ who have no clients).Your plan is to magnify their new business production.

I recommend that professionals spend 200 hours per year on business development. This equals four hours per week – a goal easily attained by meeting a referral source for coffee, visiting a client’s offices at lunch and attending a trade association meeting at an event.

Here’s why this works. If you have 10 professionals who are active four hours a week, they should meet two ideal clients per week.This works out to 1,000 contacts per year. Let’s suppose they are just terrible at what they do and have a 90% failure rate. It still works out to 100+ new clients/matters per year. And that is a return on investment the partners can take to the bank.

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Last week the LMA gave out its annual Your Honor awards.  Taking a cue from the LawMarketing Portal, the LMA put up the list of the winners online (Click here for an excel file for the full results) and actually printed a 48-page glossy brochure describing what the winners did to get the award.  (Click here to download the 2008 Winners Book (it's a 7.18 MB PDF file).

Several of the winners have already been featured on the LawMarketing Portal and Blog:

• Bingham took first place for firm identity and their famous "Grizzly Bear Holding a Baby" ad -- see Bingham Sweeps New England LMA Chapter Your Honor Awards 
• Hamilton, Brook, Smith & Reynolds got an award for their clever holiday card. See Hamilton Brook Smith Reynolds Knows the Elements of a Fun Holiday Message and their clever branded gifts: Law Firm Dispenses Medicine to Understand Boston Accent
• Foley Hoag's offbeat advertising campaign: NY Times Features Foley Hoag Advertising Campaign
• Choate Hall's web videos that mimicked the "Mac vs. PC" TV campaigns: YouTube and The Law Meet on Choate Recruiting Website
• Morrison & Foerster's creative recruiting brochure: MoFo Mojo Workin’ on Student Recruits 

Of course, I couldn't anticipate all the winners, and I'll be contacting several of them to find out key info, such as what the programs cost and what results they brought -- topics that were not thoroughly covered in the winner handbook.  I'll keep you posted on what I find out.

To review the list of first-place winners, just click the link Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

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The Chicago Bar Association asked me to record a podcast on the most effective marketing initiatives for solos and small law firms.  The recording is online at http://www.chicagobar.org/podcasts/   It's the second item: 08/24/2007 - YLS - Most Effective Marketing Techniques. 

1. Spend 2.5% of gross revenue on marketing.
2. Put video on your website.  It appeals to 30% of the US public, which has always had the Internet as part of their lives.
3. If you can't measure your marketing initiative, don't do it.  Be skeptical of advertising and public relations. Instead write blogs, websites, online banner ads, email newsletters
4. Focus on getting new files from current clients.
5. Cultivate referral sources. Start with clients, then pursue investment brokers, accountants, bankers, law school classmates and other sources.
6. Get on the board of directors of a trade association.  Get active and be visible.
7. Pursue "targets," or business executives whom you already know.
8. Write down your business plan -- whom you're going to call, when you're going to meet them and the outcome you desire.  It's inchoate until you write it down.
9. Spend 400 hours a year on business development -- four hours per week.
10. Track your results.   It's better than radio ads, which don't produce any results.

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In a controversial op-ed article entitled "Law Firm Marketing: Is It So Over We Need a New Word for Over?" Elizabeth Tursi, the Editor-in-Chief of Marketing The Law Firm, takes legal marketers -- and the LMA to task -- for failing to grow into a real profession. "Things are starting to look even gloomier," she writes.

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For close to 20 years, I have been one of the supporting voices for law firm marketing, hoping against hope that the profession would come to be accepted and that over time, law firm marketing would come into its own and garner the respect it so richly deserved. Simply stated: For the most part it has not and things are starting to look even gloomier.

"I dropped my [LMA] membership because as time went on, I found the organization to be lacking the type of educational give and take that an organization is supposed to provide its members." -- Editor Elizabeth Tursi.

Yes, there are firms that have embraced marketing and as a result of targeted marketing programs, these firms have prospered. Many of these firms appear on the annual MLF 50. But for every firm on that list there are countless others that have been unsuccessful in putting forth the premise that marketing works. I have watched the revolving door of marketing professionals and have taken note of many firms that have no marketing programs at all. You’ve got to wonder. What’s up with law firm marketing and after a somewhat good run, is it in the throes of going the way of TQM — remember that?

Where did it all go wrong? My contention is that there are several factors at work that have contributed to the current state of law firm marketing. I know I am not going to make any friends here, but this is after all an Op Ed, so here goes.

Exactly the wrong person for the job

"Betiayn is indeed ignorant. Through that ignorance she spreads insidious disinformation, hurts our profession as a whole, and, unlike most responsible Op Ed columnists, utterly fails to offer anything resembling a solution to an identified problem." -- ex-LMA president Nat Slavin.  Click here to read his full comments.

To begin, we have the selection of the actual person leading the marketing efforts. Time after time, in firm after firm, the individual selected as CMO has been exactly the wrong person for the job. Many of these individuals had been chosen based on a resume of other law firm experience. Did anyone ever stop to check to see if these candidates were successful in their prior position? The resounding answer is “no.” The reason: Because law firms thought that candidates with resumes replete with other law firm positions obviously made them marketing geniuses. Wrong again. On the other side of the spectrum is the choice of individuals from outside the world of law firms. These are the candidates who have never worked in a horizontal management structure and are completely baffled as they walk into a room of 20 or more owners. Disastrous results followed because with no political savvy (a prerequisite for working in a law firm), these individuals were clueless as to how to work within the structure. The other part of the problem is gravitas. I have been preaching about this forever. Without the ability to have a “seat at the table,” make your case, stick to it and go head to head with management, a CMO is doomed to fail.

 

Problem Number Two: There are certain questions that a candidate prior to securing the position must ask. It involves doing one’s own due diligence and asking those questions. Will I have autonomy to do a needs assessment and when the results are produced, and when I do create the plan and develop the strategy, will I be provided with the resources and buy-in from management to implement that plan? Without the answer being “yes” on the part of management, the success ratio — zero!

The wrong approach to implement marketing

Next problem: Many firms chose the wrong approach to implement the marketing plan — marketing by committee. Again, what do attorneys know about marketing — not very much. Therefore, why would a CMO be forced to sit in a room filled with attorneys giving their opinions on how to market the firm? Clearly, at the get-go, the CMO is in a no-win situation because, after all, the committee members own the place and it was their money that was being pumped into the marketing program. If a committee has to rubber-stamp each marketing activity, the overall program once again is doomed to fail. Marketing by consensus is just not the way to go.

To finish reading the article visit the LawMarketing Portal.

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By Darryl Cross in discussion with Larry Bodine  

Darryl Cross is Senior Vice President of Business Development of Concep, Inc. in New York. The company does client surveys/market research, communications, client relationship management (CRM), graphic design, holiday cards, marketing, survey software and web site development.  He can be reached at (212) 925-0380 and darryl.cross@concepglobal.com.

Darryl Cross:  We're talking looking at things from the client's bottom line point of view instead of ours. That idea leads to seven principles of client development, consistent principles that we see on a regular basis, whether they are a 30 lawyer shop in Dallas or a big New York City law firm. 

Number one is leveraging our existing assets.  There is so much content and so much information available at law firms about clients; they're swimming in it.  We're talking about things like what relationships do we have?  What is the billing history of some very large maybe pharmaceutical clients?  It tells us a lot about what kind of problems they have.  We also look at things like who are the other people we know outside of here?  What is our matter history?  What part of our existing client base could be duplicated?  We have all this content at our finger tips.  A lot of times it's out of context, but we can bring that together using technology and some good old fashioned elbow grease be able to make some sense of it. 

Principle two is once we start compiling information and seeing all those assets, we have to have the ability to think small.  Think about last time you were asked to write a short 400-word article.  Hard, isn't it, Larry? 

Larry Bodine:  It's much harder than writing a 2000-word article. 

Darryl Cross:  It's a great exercise to take a 1000-word article and nail it down to 500, then 250, and then a 50-word synopsis.  It's a great exercise in thinking small.  Here's another one you should take back to your law firms to illustrate the need to think small when it comes to business development:  When you have a gathering of lawyers in the room, ask every lawyer to pull out of piece of paper and take 15 seconds to write down 5 clients they've never done work with before.  I've never run into a group that can't.  The world is way too big, and there are too many opportunities and too many possibilities. 

For the rest of the article visit the Originate Web Site at http://www.pbdi.org/Originate/default.asp?Action=GetDetails&ArticleID=99.  An annual subscription costs only $397.

 

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