The 'good old' days of legal marketing seem simple, in retrospect: hang out your shingle, give good service and wait for the money to roll in. The firm's rainmaker schmoozed clients, the bills were short ("to all legal services rendered," followed by a very big number), and best of all, clients paid up.
If legal marketing were ever that easy, things changed around 1980. More lawyers graduated from law school, 'gentlemanly' understandings about advertising practice began to fall away, and suddenly clients didn't just jump out of the water and into the boat anymore.
Like it or not (and many don't), every lawyer needs to market his or her practice now, a task for which our training has left us singularly unprepared. Now, a new breed of legal marketing specialists has evolved to fill that need. In-house staff or outside contractors, law practice background or not, they all serve the same function: find and retain clients.
Barbara Sessions is an attorney with Chicago's third-largest law firm, Winston & Strawn, but she no longer practises law. As the firm's in-house Director of Marketing, she and her staff handle all the marketing efforts for the firm and its 700 lawyers. It's a lot more than designing snappy ads for the Yellow Pages: she maintains the integrity of the firm's brand campaign, establishes extranet connections with key clients and strategic partners, and teaches business development skills to new hires.
"The rainmaker is alive and well," Sessions says. "They know how to communicate with clients and they understand the difference between substantive law and excellent client service. But they need strategic support." She teaches others in the firm how to provide that support.
Sessions is also president of the board of the Legal Marketing Association, a dynamic organization of legal marketing consultants that has grown to over 1,000 members since its founding in 1985. The LMA, which will hold its annual conference in Toronto next March, signals the legal marketers' rise in influence - a rise that's been reflected in Canada as well.
For example, Atlantic firm Stewart McKelvey Stirling Scales used to hire an outside marketing agency, but about a year ago they decided to bring the expertise inside the firm. They lured Marina Atwell from Toronto back to her maritime roots to be Director of Marketing.
"They wanted someone in-house to learn and understand the workings of the firm and to keep them on strategy and onside with each of the provincial law societies," Atwell says, "(They also wanted) someone who was sensitive to the fact that Halifax is different from Charlottetown is different from St. John's."
Atwell's not a lawyer; her background and experience is in business and marketing. But she's delighted to be back and to be working in a brand new field. "Legal marketing is only a decade old in Canada, and it's one of the fastest growing professions," she says. "We bring a new scope of thinking into a traditional profession that has mixed feelings about marketing. I like the challenge."
Marketing specialists aren't only for large, multi-jurisdictional firms. Chris Keylor has been marketing director for Edmonton's Reynolds Mirth for the past ten years. A firm of 30 lawyers and 70 support staff, it was one of the first in Alberta to hire a marketing specialist. Keylor's not a lawyer either, although she had worked for the firm as a paralegal before assuming her current responsibilities.
"My job is to be a catalyst and a visionary for the firm," says Keylor. "My key role is to develop and implement marketing initiatives in harmony with our business development plan." Currently, she's finalizing an associates' training program while maintaining the firm's Web site. She also spends a lot of time preparing and responding to requests for proposals. "We get more and more RFPs," she says. "In fact, that's the biggest change I've seen in the past five years."
There are now a number of in-house marketing specialists Alberta-wide, Keylor says. She expects to have more counterparts before long, judging from the many calls she receives from firms looking for advice on hiring one.
So where do you find a good marketer? Kathy Hogarth, Marketing Administrator for Lawson Lundell in Vancouver, lists a number of prime locations:
- marketing programs at local colleges;
- local chapters of professional marketers' associations (such as the Canadian Society for Marketing Professional Services, the American Marketing Association, or the LMA); and
- marketers employed with other professions who are looking for new challenges.
According to Hogarth, the ideal candidate doesn't need a law background. "Knowledge of how law firms work is helpful, but not imperative," she says. "But they do need the smarts to understand the difference between a flat organization and a hierarchical one."
A law firm is flat because each partner has an equal say, so each has the right to parade into the marketer's office with his or her own idea of how things should be done. "Firms [can] avoid that," she says, "by establishing a business development committee, with representation from each practice group."
But that committee has to lay some groundwork well before interviewing candidates for the marketing position. "The firm has to identify its marketing needs," Hogarth points out. "It has to decide what message it wants to send out, who it wants to send it to, and how."
Law practice marketers can even provide assistance with lawyer development. Part of Sessions's job is to help every lawyer at the firm create a personal marketing plan, something that requires taking an honest look at their interpersonal skills.
The plan is reviewed periodically, she says, and remedial training helps polish any dull spots. So far, these plans are not officially part of the promotion review process, but they help lawyers understand the firm's strategic direction.
With inroads like these, law firm marketers may soon be considered an essential part of any law practice's long-term competitive strategy. But even at this early stage, it's clear that hanging out a shingle isn't enough anymore.
Tom Carter is an Edmonton lawyer and freelance legal affairs writer.