Making the transition to law firm marketing

Feature

posted 2 Oct 2001 in Volume 4 Issue 6

Making the transition to law firm marketing

BBC business correspondent Nik Wood caused a stir in legal circles last year when he left journalism to take up the post as director of marketing with Hammond Suddards Edge. His assignments in terrorist areas of Colombia and in the tough financial markets of Japan would, he thought, prepare him for a new life in the law. In reality he found himself being thrown in at the deep end.

It was, by any stretch of the imagination, a baptism of fire. On the Monday when I took up my new post with Hammond Suddards, the announcement was made of the merger with Edge Ellison, the London and Birmingham law firm. The deadline for the merger was one month away, just four weeks to organise re-branding, stationery, new signage, a fresh web site and integrate the marketing teams.

On the Tuesday I was hosting a meeting with the corporate identity arm of WPP, the merged firm's biggest client. These people had just completed a change of face for one of the UK's biggest accountancy firms. The difference was they had nine months to complete that process!

On the Friday I found myself before the senior partners of both organisations expected to present a detailed strategy for the merged firm going forward - even the most stressful periods of live television did not prepare me for this ordeal.

So as a first week in a new career, it was challenging to say the least.

The following 12 months has seen no let up. The firm has announced the opening of new offices in Germany, France and Italy, and made it clear that they are looking to other European centres. In addition, Hammonds has been joined by other boutique firms in the sports and asset-based lending markets.

In the space of a year, therefore, the make-up of Hammonds has changed dramatically and I have learned some valuable lessons about building a successful marketing team for one of Europe's leading commercial law firms.

Authority

The positioning of a marketing director in the firm is a key factor. The department they command needs to build respect and that can only be achieved through its figurehead. Increasingly, law firms are creating marketing directors with partner status who can operate at board level. This is not a role for the faint-hearted; a director must be able to stand up to partners and earn respect but bluff, as they say, is not enough. If anyone is going to cut through the facade of bravado it is the cynical partners of a law firm and it requires a calm nerve to cut the mustard when the going gets tough.

The appointment of a director at senior level creates two-way traffic. It leads to an air of confidence in the decision-making process if that director can win the support of senior partners on everything from highly controversial issues, such as the colour of the firm's brochures, to the longer term business development strategy designed to help them compete in the complex legal markets. It also has a significant impact on the marketing department itself whose members feel more valued as a team and as individuals within the corporate structure if they have a voice at senior level.

The team is everything

It goes without saying, but the team itself is one of the most vital components of a successful marketing strategy. The temptation as a new broom is to sweep clean too early and make changes for the sake of making changes. Taking up a post from outside the professional services forces a new director to think twice before imposing a reshuffle and this is, in the longer term, a sound strategy.

Inspiring this collection of business development executives, PR managers, creative designers and events organisers is an art in itself. Communication is key and here my own background in front of the camera and as a coach on the rugby field has, I feel, helped me cope with the rigours of running a 30-strong team.

It is vital to be realistic. The marketing community is, by its nature, a transient society and some of its members resemble corporate Bedouin - so the question is, how do you bring about stability and how do you motivate the people you manage?

Face up to the reality of this nomadic society and you will draw maximum benefit. Picking your team leaders carefully is essential, but empowering the more junior players will also dramatically improve quality. Give selected members of your team key projects to lead and be honest and open about the value they will personally gain from success. First of all make sure their name is clearly associated with the initiative both in the department and the firm as a whole. Second, be open about explaining how their work on a specific project will give them tangible added value to their CV when they eventually decide to move to pastures new. How many of us are sick of job candidates extolling their 'strong interpersonal skills' and how much better to see evidence that they had direct responsibility for developing systems such as a website or database.

Get the internals right and the externals will follow

The BBC is one of the world's most respected brands. This once monolithic corporation invested in state-of-the-art systems because its senior management realised that it had to improve its planning and research to allow it to raise the quality of its world-class newsgathering service. This would, in turn, allow it to compete with the onset of cable and satellite channels, and differentiate itself from this growing threat to its global share of the media markets.

Law firms are also investing heavily in systems that govern their activities in document handling, management of client relationships, business analysis and data gathering. This flurry of electronic development often requires huge levels of investment and can highlight conflicts of interest between partners, marketing and the IT department.

We should never forget that lawyers, despite popular myth, are human. Of course the legal world contains more than its fair share of computer literati, but for every geek there is always a Luddite working next door. Time is a premium product for professionals who bill by the hour and therefore these systems should be simple to use, attractive to look at and completely interactive.

Getting the internal network right is vital if a firm is to successfully market itself externally. In the world of corporate law, commercial navel-gazing is absolutely essential, so a deals database is needed. This can then be linked to the firm's website so that successes can be picked for public consumption.

A client relationship management system should be based on a search-engine design. Partners and fee-earners who are used to scanning the world wide web will identify with its simplicity while the avenues of information that lie behind its front page can be extremely complex.

Internal communication is another area where technology can be harnessed. At Hammonds we introduced an internal magazine that is popular, but it can only produced once a month. With foreign offices and mergers being announced at such a fast pace the issue we faced was how to communicate with personnel in an instant once a new transaction was completed.

The answer came in the form of an intranet magazine designed and operated by the marketing department and complete with constantly changing stories and photographs. The system is built on a network of administration pages allowing the team to input words and pictures in a matter of seconds, and a pilot scheme is already planned to run video clips of major announcements. The secret here is to blend staff news and gossip with information on business successes.

Media awareness

Any new marketing director likes to record some early wins, so in my case media relations were an obvious choice. Broadcasting contacts have helped ensure that Hammonds' people have appeared on every major outlet over the last year. Our lawyers have appeared as experts in employment law commenting on everything from email abuse to sexual antics at the office Christmas party. We have provided the 'typical' family for features on foot and mouth and the transport crisis, and when we have not been able to provide interviewees we have been able to find an organisation, or even a rival law firm that is only too pleased to step in.

In the written media too we have built up an impressive list of contacts. It helps to have an inside track on the media, but many law firms could vastly improve their press profiles if they simply adopted a similar approach to journalists as they do to their clients.

In short it is all about relationships.

Some public relations managers regard a relationship with the media as little more than an excuse for wining and dining, and there no doubt that certain factions of the Fifth Estate are still susceptible to this thinly disguised form of bribery. The reality is that even the newsrooms of the tabloid press are now more sober places than in the days when business was generally carried out in the saloon bar of the local hostelry. Today the media is more businesslike and, with growing competition in the sector, its people require its contributors to add real value to their publication or programme.

It obviously pays to know the market. The broadcast media, for instance, relies heavily on a planning structure. Identify the all-powerful planning editor and you are half way there. The next trick is to get your story on their agenda and get your people in their contact books. Personal contacts are essential, but well crafted materials that clearly point to forthcoming events such as changes in the law or government legislation are often well received by those responsible for putting news and current affairs programmes together.

Business programming is one of the fastest growing areas of television and radio news with the BBC's own director general Greg Dyke committing the corporation to further investment so it is an area well worth exploiting.

Window on the world

Some of the most exciting opportunities for communicating with clients and the press surround forthcoming advances in new media.

The vast majority of law firms now operate their own website. Recent research by the Legal Research Group, looking at the highs and lows of sites operated by the legal profession, emphasised the importance of offering a suitable internet presence. The evolution of web design, from simple brochure ware to complex marketing and legal tools, is well under way. Exciting new opportunities are on the horizon for those firms prepared to spend time and resource on researching the potential for harnessing these changes in online technology.

There is no doubt that the overall strategy of the site as a business tool should be in the hands of partners. They should be best placed to determine the demands of their clients and the content required to feed their commercial desires.

In the world of new media, however, the marketers should be on the case.

Convergence is the new buzzword. The question is whether your television will become a computer or vice versa. The answer could be both. On the domestic scene the television set is already a powerful computer for those who subscribe to the new digital channels. Home shopping and interactive programming are the services that are most in use.

In the commercial world though it will be the PC that becomes a television. There is no doubt that the internet is one of the most powerful global communication systems we have. However a generation of people who have spent a significant proportion of their lives glued to the TV screen are now been asked to take a step backwards when they go online. Currently video streaming is largely a novelty. It is poor quality, painfully slow and, in a commercial environment, often blocked by anti-viral firewalls.

The UK has been hopelessly slow in the move towards the systems that will act as the pipeline for carrying quality moving images through the world wide web. But the development of broadband and wireless technology is now becoming a reality and this will create a raft of new opportunities for those who are well placed to benefit from the improvements.

Law firms should already be examining the potential for exploiting new media online seminars, which will suddenly become an option and make question and answer sessions on legal subjects a serious possibility. Video emails and presentations will be the fashion and there will be no need to book that videoconference via a meeting room. There will also be implications for internal communication. Major organisations already spend millions of pounds on satellite links to their workforce. The broadband revolution will dramatically reduce the cost of such operations and open it up to many more outlets.

To partners in a law firm it all sounds very far away. The reality is that it is here already and the opportunities should be closely examined to avoid being eclipsed by the opposition.

Nikolas Wood is the director of marketing of Hammond Suddards Edge and can be contacted on nik.wood@hammondse.com.