Q&A: Video magic

When US firm Torys LLP asked its clients how they preferred to receive information on legal issues they opted for a face-to-face approach. For that reason, the firm decided to film short, snappy video podcasts featuring its lawyers. Kate Clifton spoke with Stuart Wood, director of marketing and business development, to find out more about the project.

Why did you decide to start podcasting?

We run a series of client breakfasts, which are extremely well attended and we received feedback from our clients that they liked to hear insights from our lawyers in a face-to-face experience. Instead of reading a bulletin or other publication, they seemed to like coming in and participating in a conversation, having the opportunity to hear our lawyers speaking ‘live’.

This was combined with a mergers and acquisitions (M&A) trends document that we produced, which proved to be extremely popular with our clients. Given how much interest there was in the topic and the large number of follow-up questions we were receiving, we began to think about how we might reach out to a broader group of clients with some additional insight into M&A topics.

So, we pulled these two drivers together and looked for different ways in which we could take that content to our clients – other than a publication – based on their feedback as to how they preferred to speak to us.

In addition, last year the firm spent a lot of time on ‘nuts and bolts’ business development and marketing activity, so I thought that this had the potential to be a fun project that the people on my team would enjoy. Don’t get me wrong, the rest of our work is extremely interesting and challenging, but perhaps not as much fun as this.

How long are the podcasts?

We’ve done 11 or 12 podcasts so far, which are generally between three and five minutes in length. We were asked to keep them fairly tight and focused on the feedback we’ve received from clients.

Are they produced entirely in-house?

We hire a videographer to come in and do the filming; then we go through them. We don’t do the actual editing, but we watch them and piece together the presentation we would like to see in the final edit, through conversation with the lawyer who is involved.

Your first podcast was about M&A trends. How do you select topics?

One example, we have a partner in our office, Cheryl Reicin, who heads up our life-sciences group. We’d had a couple of meetings with local reporters for newspaper business sections and there was a huge amount of interest in her, so we thought it would be a good idea to see how the podcasts worked outside of the M&A space. She actually got a client out of the exercise. Someone watched the video, which touched on a lot of the issues that he was wrestling with at the time, so he decided to call her.

Have the podcasts generated much new business or are they geared more towards your existing clients?

They’re mostly geared towards our existing clients. Certainly, the majority of people who have come to watch them have existing relationships with the firm. We weren’t expecting to win the client who specifically cited the life-sciences podcast, so that was a nice surprise. It wasn’t a very expensive project to pull together so, even from just that one matter, we essentially paid for the project.

Some say that podcasting isn’t effective as a marketing tool, or is inappropriate…?

We’re obviously big fans of it and we have had lots of positive feedback from clients. We rely on our clients to tell us whether they like it and appreciate it as an opportunity to hear from our lawyers.

In this case, we obviously monitor very closely how many people are watching the podcasts, we ask people to provide feedback and we keep track of the information we are receiving.

We try to let our clients drive our behaviour – if they don’t keep coming to watch the podcasts, we won’t continue to make them. We’ve definitely had more people than we expected.

How do the podcasts add to the firm image you try to communicate to clients?

We see ourselves as creative and innovative and that’s certainly how we would like people to think about us. To the extent that clients take away a feeling that ‘these people are creative thinkers and are coming up with new ideas’ – it’s a good association to have.

One of the things that the lawyers are very focused on is that they’re not using scripted answers. Each podcast is an opportunity for the lawyers to have a conversation with a broad spectrum of clients. They’re very heavy on content, which the lawyers drive themselves, and they’re very focused on continuing to cover relevant subjects. Podcasts wouldn’t work effectively for every topic. There has to be something that the lawyers want to say and which will be useful for clients.

So, as long as that continues, the content standard remains and there is a focus on thought leadership, that’s what will ensure that the lawyers are comfortable working on the project, and why it adds value to the clients who are watching the podcasts.

It must be nice to have your lawyers on board?

They’ve been very enthusiastic. The best part is that the response to the first wave of podcasts was so positive that we decided to do more, and we actually had significantly more volunteers than we needed, which is great.

Stuart Wood is director of marketing and business development at US firm Torys LLP. He can be contacted at swood@torys.com. This article was originally published in the June/July 2007 issue of Legal Marketing magazine.