Strategic communication in an expanding market

For firms looking to gain competitive advantage in a global market, enhancing business profile and market position can prove a key strategy. Success, however, demands a well-planned and focused internal and external communication programme.

By Jolene Overbeck, chief marketing officer, Shearman & Sterling LLP

Follow just one leading AmLaw law firm, Latham & Watkins, on its trajectory from a local Los Angeles based firm to a global leader. Powerful communications with relevant audiences was a key ingredient for building its reputation and achieving success. Persuasive communications helped build brand. Consistent internal communications helped tie people together with a shared sense of purpose and enabled the organisation to protect its reputation over rough patches.

But, for a communications programme to have this type of impact, it must be linked tightly to the firm’s strategy and be treated as a priority function.

It must also operate across all levels of the organisation – firm wide and in all of its strategic business units, practice groups, industry segments and individual practitioners.

The audit

Start building a strategic and effective roadmap for communication by analysing all current communications. Gather copies of all materials and identify in-person meetings. Build an excel spreadsheet detailing who creates each communication, its publication timing and format (electronic, hard copy etc.). Describe the content and tone, purpose of the communication and identify the intended recipients or participants. Then think about the audiences that are important to the firm – clearly clients and prospective clients, but equally critical, especially in a time when there are fewer law-school graduates and competition is fierce for top candidates, are potential recruits. Other relevant audiences include current lawyers and staff members, potential laterals, and journalists.

Overlay the audience map with a grid. Is the firm reaching each important audience with communications that have the right tone and that are in a format the recipients prefer? Do they articulate and reinforce the firm’s vision and strategy? Are the communications clear, interesting and appealing? Don’t take your own word for it; as George Bernard Shaw said: “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Reach out to members of each audience to solicit their views, discuss their preferences and ask whether they are receiving the information they want to receive in a format in which they want to receive it. Against that backdrop, use the grid to plan what new communications you will develop, which will be left behind, and which will be revamped. Think carefully about the publication calendar and schedule communications to avoid information overload.

Internal communication

The most important squares on the grid relate to internal communication. Any successful strategic-communication programme starts with powerful internal communications. That is because charismatic and consistent internal communications help ensure that those inside the firm support external communications because they understand and embrace the business’s vision and strategy. Armed with this understanding, they can help promote the organisation, explain its direction, and help reduce the significance of negative press when it comes. Internal communications help build thriving organisations, where all believe that leadership is committed to making their life better by satisfying particular personal needs – more financial rewards, prestige and a reputation for belonging to a market-leading organisation, a sense of personal contribution to a greater goal, membership of an elite.

Channels and vehicles

There are many communication channels and vehicles that can be used to reach internal audiences. Use the communications grid you have developed to see which are being used and which are not. Fill in the gaps and, based on the input you have solicited from across the firm, revamp communication pieces where necessary. Do not hesitate to kill a publication if your outreach makes it clear that it is not effective. As you create new communications, keep them short and be creative. And never, ever create communications by committee unless of course you want to create spam.

Use in-person meetings and town halls for firm management to communicate personally, always reinforcing the vision and direction forward. Create mantras;
Educate people about the firm’s practice capabilities. Generate electronic bulletins that summarise the clients and matters of various practice groups and geographic regions to facilitate cross-selling. Begin each with a paragraph from the leader that reinforces how the work fits the firm’s strategy;
Tout successes in e-mails sent by practice-group leaders or office managing partners. Congratulate those who have accomplished significant wins for clients or completed landmark transactions;
Pull people together across hierarchical lines by distributing office newsletters with stories about and from attorneys and staff. Communicate cultural diversity;
Highlight areas that help weave together the fabric and culture of the firm such as pro bono. Tell stories about people, the challenges they face, and how the firm helped. Give the opportunity for people to feel good about their contributions;
Use current technology effectively. Can practice groups use blogs to encourage dialog or RSS feeds to keep people current on developments? Should you make podcasts of major presentations available?
Involve your clients. Invite them to internal meetings. Ask them to be guest columnists. Feature them and their achievements in your newsletters.

Recognise when you begin that internal communications are rarely uniformly positively received. Law firms are loosely-tied groups of over-achievers.

All want to speak and be heard. Sarcastic, critical commentary about anything and everything is second nature and entertainment. Lawyers are trained to be analytical and to find ‘what’s wrong with this picture’ not ‘what’s right’. So, solicit and listen to feedback. Be sensitive to cultural differences. Make changes if you are hearing the same thing from multiple quarters, but resist the impulse to change the course of internal communications too radically or too quickly in response to isolated criticism.

Communications have impact when executed over the long-term, driving home desired core messages that help paint a picture of where the organisation wants to go. Premature abandonment of a communications programme in an overreaction to criticism gives up hard-won ground and breeds confusion.

This article treats internal communications first because it should be the first priority. Many law firms make the mistake of focusing primarily on external communications and media. But if the internal population is not in sync with what is being communicated externally, reporters will easily (and quite rightly) undermine your story by incorporating inconsistent and contradictory views from people within the firm, because people will lack a common vision.

Controlled external publications

Starting again from the communications grid you have prepared, focus, then, on external communications over which you have the most control and that target your most important audiences with precision. As you review each communication, don’t assume that you are the best judge of its effectiveness. Do some market research with each audience you are trying to reach to be sure you are communicating information that is desired, valued and distributed in the preferred format. Ask yourself some tough questions:

Review recruiting materials. Are they fresh and do they communicate effectively with a Generation X audience? Does the firm rely too heavily on written communications? Is the website ‘sticky’ and does it provide information that law-school students have told you they are interested in?
Examine client publications such as newsletters and ‘Alerts’. Do your mailing lists ensure that you are reaching the right people within the organisation? Is the information timely? If you are reaching clients with information two weeks after you see ‘Alerts’ from competitors, rethink your internal processes. Create an editorial calendar noting clear individual responsibility for producing publications or for covering particular areas of the law on a timely basis;
Are your communications boring and overly legalistic? Seek editing help from professional writers. Remember the rule that ‘vigorous writing is concise’;
Determine how your publications stack up against the competition. Collect and compare materials. Is your firm’s brand conveyed compellingly and attractively in a manner that distinguishes your pieces from the competition?
Again, think about relatively new technologies and delivery systems and whether they are the right vehicles for communicating with your target audience. Clearly, blogs and other tools such as RSS feed have great potential for communicating thought leadership and we are starting to see some interesting developments.

External media

With internal communications and controlled publications covered, turn your attention to external media work. Success may start with building media contacts, but keep in mind, as I was recently reminded, that these are very often transactional relationships. Relationships may help you get a call returned and create a more sympathetic ear when there is a need to tell a different side of a difficult story, but reporters are paid to write news and stories. If there is no news and no story, don’t waste the reporter’s time.

But every firm has news and stories to tell. Pitching successfully starts with having your ear close to the rail internally. When news happens, you should be ready to communicate it quickly to the right media contacts in a compelling manner. To get the news when it’s fresh, communications professionals should be included in key internal meetings with management committees, practice groups, office partners and other committee sessions. This will also help them to understand the overall business strategy, the strategy for practice groups and offices, and how that fits into the overall firm game plan.

It is relatively easy to ensure a steady stream of news communication with the media. But, strategic communications take place only when the communications professional is savvy about what the firm and lawyers in a particular practice ‘sell’, who they sell it to, and why clients buy it. Second, it depends upon the communications professional understanding what key media reporters will ‘buy’. Strategic communications result when the connections fire consistently between these two poles over the long-term:

Gain an understanding of what your lawyers sell by making regular appointments with lawyers from different areas;
Interview them about their practice, ask about their clients and try to understand why they were hired for a particular piece of business;
Read their client publications;
Review pitch documents and resumes;
And, of course, try to sit in on practice group and office meetings.

Learn what reporters will buy by doing the obvious – read their columns. Read the publications in which their columns appear. Be clear about the tone and slant of their work. Try to meet them and, when you do, spend more time listening rather than talking. Don’t be stupid by being unprepared for the meeting. Be ready to answer questions about what is going on in your firm and have something interesting to say about your firm.

Be always mindful of your objective: to generate media that will enhance your firm’s and your lawyers’ reputation for leadership and expertise in the areas that are of strategic importance.

Then, just do it. Stay in touch with key reporters constantly. Make sure that deals and cases that reinforce the firm’s reputation in an area are communicated to the right reporters. Let them know when you are having seminars where it would be appropriate for them to attend. Bring them in-house to meet with lawyers for briefings on new regulatory practice and industry developments. Have reporters meet with firm management to discuss trends in the business of law. Hold annual briefings for regional contacts to discuss financial performance and the firm’s progress against strategy during the previous year. Review the communication team’s performance monthly to be sure that it is on target with pitches consistent with the firm’s vision and overall strategy.

Creating and maintaining a strategic communications programme involves a lot of heavy lifting. Obtain maximum benefit from every effort by applying leverage. Make sure that members of the global-communications team meet regularly, share what they have learnt from interactions with practitioners and co-ordinate on story ideas and pitches. Merchandise good publications and media clips in pitch books, use them in internal meetings to illustrate market leadership, place them on the website, on the front page if it is important news with a link to the relevant practice area and lawyer biography. Distribute copies internally by e-mail. Any seminar will result in material that can become part of the communications stream. Perhaps a presentation can be turned into a client publication. It might also become an internal communication or educational tool.

Strategic communications can produce a significant return on investment for a law firm. Treat it as a priority, focus first on internal communications, then stay on track with external media mapped tightly to the firm’s strategy. Hold the course long term and then relish your organisation’s enhanced profile and market position.

Jolene M. Overbeck is chief marketing officer at Shearman & Sterling LLP. She can be contacted at jolene.overbeck@shearman.com