13 Signs It Is Time to Hire an Outside Marketing Professional

Marketing is the backbone of your law firm’s growth. Think of it this way: a bad attorney can still drum up a substantial amount of business with an impressive marketing plan, but an excellent attorney’s skills will not save them from a weak or nonexistent marketing plan. If you are wondering if you have outgrown your current marketing plan, look for these signs that you need an outside professional.

1. Marketing Takes Up More Than 15 Minutes of Your Billable Time

As an attorney, you should spend most of your time doing what you do best. If you spend more than 15 minutes per day writing and scheduling tweets, checking marketing metrics, or optimizing your blog posts, you are wasting time that should be spent researching, meeting with clients, or preparing for court. Outsource these tasks to a professional.

2. Your Returns Have Plateaued

Seeing big returns on your law firm’s marketing efforts is exciting, which is why plateaus are so disappointing. Without in-depth marketing education and experience, you are unlikely to know what it takes to overcome those plateaus. And while there is a wealth of online information on how to do it yourself, it is a better use of your time and skill to involve a professional consultant that can highlight new ways to bring in potential clients.

3. You Want to Take Your Marketing to the Next Level

No matter how brilliant and creative you are when it comes to selling yourself and your practice, you would be amazed at the opportunities and ideas that a professional can bring to the table. Whether it is identifying a potential sub-market that could grow your law firm, or developing new branding ideas that speak to a different demographic than your typical client, an outside marketing consultant can enhance your current strategy and increase your return on investment.

4. A Big Change or Event is Approaching

An important event or big change in your firm is a massive marketing opportunity, but can also be a massive source of stress. With so many small details to consider, as well as pressure for the event to be successful, a holistic marketing company can provide you with wrap-around support for your event. Not only can they show you the best ways to market your event, but may also offer event planning services, subcontractor management, and even discounted purchasing on your behalf.

5. Your In-House Team Has Become Complacent

In-house marketing teams can work as well-oiled machines, properly allocating their efforts across different team members and projects. In some cases, though, they become complacent and stop giving your firm the time and effort necessary to bring in new clients. Instead of trying to motivate a team that has lost passion for seeing your law firm succeed, consider adding an outside marketing eye to your mix. Often legal marketing consultants offer hourly consultation rates that are perfect for when you simply want a fresh perspective and a new direction without a long-term commitment.

6. You Are Striking Out on Your Own

Starting your own law firm is a significant accomplishment. Avoid the trap of saving money by engaging in DIY marketing. Although it may seem like a good way to cut costs at the outset, shoddy marketing and tone-deaf messaging can actually do far more financial damage than the amount you might save. From logo design and business cards to innovative pay-per-click campaigns and social media marketing, it is better to start out on the right foot with a solid marketing team or consultant that can give you a solid foundation for the future.

7. Circumstances Call for Rebranding

No one is perfect, and every law firm has had its fair share of blunders. However, when a huge mistake smears your name and causes any Google search of your firm to reflect poorly on your brand, it is time to call in a professional legal marketer. They can help mitigate reviews, consult on best next steps, and develop a re-branding strategy that can save your business before negative press starts affecting your bottom line.

8. You Do Not Have Time to Pursue Further Credentialing

In the legal world, reputation is key to success. For many lawyers, this means participation in cause marketing, leadership in relevant associations, and pursuing awards and credentialing opportunities. Unfortunately, not every lawyer has the time, means, or energy to research these opportunities and develop them. A good outside marketing consultant will be able to review your experience and professional strengths and use them to find appropriate places for you to speak, guest author, and submit yourself for public recognition for the good that you do.

9. You Want Help Understanding Your Marketing Analytics

Whether you work with an in-house marketing team or do your own law firm marketing, detailed analysis is a vital part of knowing what is working with your marketing strategy. This can become very frustrating, especially if you are receiving or running reports that you do not understand. Instead of trying to give yourself a full marketing education, turn them over to a specialist. An outside legal marketing consultant can review your analytics with you, highlight the areas that are meeting expectations and give suggestions on how to improve those areas that are slow.

10. Blog Upkeep is Getting Away From You

Companies with blogs get, on average, 67% more leads than companies without blogs, according to Demand Metric. It is not enough to create a new post whenever your schedule allows; blogging has to be a scheduled and highly prioritized part of your marketing plan. If your updates are becoming more and more infrequent, a marketing specialist can create a content calendar and even help you hire a ghostwriter to ensure that the posts keep coming.

11. Your Presentation and Publication Schedule Is No Longer Manageable

If you are not on top of your presentation and publication schedule, a marketing specialist can help you organize, prepare for, and promote these important parts of your marketing strategy. Remember, every presentation you make and every publication you produce is a chance to reach new clients. It makes sense to hire someone who knows how to best identify new avenues for this kind of credentialing and can take the time to ensure that everything is in order so that you are set up for success with no stress on your part.

12. Client Prospects Are Drying Up

Every law firm has slower spells and busy times. Still, if you are noticing a downward trend, it is time to analyze whether it is a normal dip in activity or a problem with some element of your marketing plan. If you have already exhausted your current networking and marketing efforts but business is still not picking up, a marketing professional can give some much needed insight.

13. Your Online Properties Are Out-of-Date or Poorly Managed

Your image is everything. Attorney websites with broken links, attorney bios that have not been updated in years, and abandoned blogs can lead clients to think you are no longer practicing. Hire a marketing specialist to consolidate online properties and manage their upkeep.

Choosing the right marketing expert can breathe new life into your client prospects and take your success to the next level. With the right support, your law firm can be flexible and relevant, able to identify new opportunities that will keep your law firm growing into a legacy worth having.


© 2020 Denver Legal Marketing LLC

For more on marketing for law firms, see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.

How to Build a Legal Blog from the Ground Up

Blogging is one of the most straightforward ways to share your legal expertise, strengthen your reputation amongst peers and potential clients, and become a valuable resource to your community. Once you know basic SEO principles and have a writing schedule that you stick to, it can be fairly simple. You already have the expertise. Now, learn how to share it by creating an engaging, educational, and helpful legal blog.

Before All Else, Know Your Law Firm’s Target Market

Being an expert in your area of practice is one thing; effectively sharing that knowledge with your target market is another. One issue that legal professionals run into while blogging is failing to write to their audience. When writing to non-lawyers, avoid using legal language that lay people do not understand, cite sources in a way that does not interrupt the flow of your writing, and avoid an overly formal tone.

You already know who your target market is: your clients and potential referral sources. If your goal is to connect better with potential clients, write in a way that appeals to their needs and is easily readable. It is easy to write about complex, multifaceted issues in a technical and legally accurate manner, but it is an art form to write about those same topics in a way that a person with no legal background can digest.

If your target market is lawyers—as is the case when you rely primarily on other attorneys for referrals—feel free to write in a way that connects with other attorneys. Still, avoid jargon and make sure that your work is clear and concise, as unnecessary “filler” bogs down your writing and can lose readers.

Regardless of who you are marketing your blog to, make sure that your tone matches your branding as well as your intended audience. If you are not writing in a way that connects with your audience, the time you put into your blog will not pay off.

Top SEO Tips for Law Firm Blogs

Knowing just a handful of common SEO tricks and techniques is enough to get you started. As you expand your legal blog and spend more time using it as a marketing tool, you may wish to invest in marketing services that allow you to expand your reach. To begin, use these techniques in your writing:

Diversify Your Law Firm Blog Posts

This is a tough balance to strike. You want to be narrow enough that people know what type of topics to expect every time they visit your blog, but you also want to be diverse enough that people do not get bored. Mix up your content between evergreen topics and trending topics. Articles that are not contingent on timely topics bring in readers over years, while trending topics can bring big boosts of readers as they are relevant to current events. Both are necessary to maintain high traffic and get new eyes on your website.

In addition, consider diversifying blog post lengths. Data from HubSpot indicates that long-form posts perform best, with the target range being around 2,000 words. Still, if 200, 500, or 1000 words will suffice, padding it out to 2,000 words is a waste of your readers’ time. What this does mean is that you should spend considerable time crafting in-depth posts that answer questions and offer clear value to readers. The shorter posts can also be helpful when the point is clear and they are meant to be quickly read through.

Make Law Firm Blog Posts Engaging and Attractive

No one clicks on a blog post and wants to be hit with a wall of text. There are many ways you can make your posts easy to digest, attractive, and welcoming. Make use of subheadings and bold text within your posts, which not only break up your information, but signal important key topics to search robots. White space through paragraph breaks is a great way to increase readability of longer posts.

In addition, posts with relevant images get 94% more views than those without images. To avoid copyright issues, use royalty-free image sources like:

You can also create or commission infographics that sum up the main points of your post into an easy-to-share format.

The Power of Consistent Action

When you commit to blogging, commit fully with a realistic schedule. When lawyers begin blogs, they often plan on posting whenever their schedule allows. Unfortunately, this often translates into occasional posts or an empty blog. A blog that has not been updated for weeks or months tells potential clients that you may not be active, that you may be too busy for new clients, and that you may not even be in business anymore. By creating a consistent blog schedule, you can get into the habit of producing high-quality content and steadily increasing your readership each week.

Your legal blog could help you reach an entire new audience. From new professional connections to new clients, the benefits of a legal blog are endless.


© 2020 Denver Legal Marketing LLC\

For more on legal marketing, see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.

Supporting Diverse Attorneys: How Marketing Pros Can Become a Business Development Ally

The path to partnership, which many attorneys aspire to achieve, can be a long and challenging road. In order to get there, an attorney’s ability to generate new business is a critical component. The partnership track can be even more difficult for diverse attorneys, as this group tends to lag behind their counterparts in business development. It begs the question: Why do diverse attorneys face challenges in business development, and how can marketing and business development professionals better support their diverse attorneys?

During the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) Southwest Region Conference in September 2019, Tasneem Khokha and Holly Barocio from GrowthPlay, presented on how we can better understand and counsel diverse attorneys, and examined the main challenges these attorneys face in building and sustaining their book of business.

Some of the key challenges Tasneem and Holly discussed, include:

  • A lack of, or much smaller network of, potential business as compared to their counterparts.
  • Feelings of being labeled as the token diverse attorney to add to a pitch.
  • Feeling as though they lack a common ground with decision-makers because of different life experiences.
  • Feeling pressure to have to work harder in order to “prove” themselves.
  • Feeling uncomfortable asking for opportunities as compared to their counterparts.

So how can marketing and business development professionals help their attorneys navigate these concerns? It starts with listening and understanding. No one can make the experiences that diverse attorneys face disappear, but marketing professionals can help them turn these challenges into opportunities and set them up to handle future experiences with ease. It’s important to remember the underlying characteristics of great business development, which are:

  • Being an authentic relationship builder.
  • Having the ability to provide solutions to problems, even if you aren’t always rewarded for your efforts.
  • Avoiding pitfalls, such as rushing to sell too soon.

While some diverse attorneys may inherently have a smaller network, if they are armed with the skill set to build authentic relationships and provide solutions to problems, they will be viewed as someone others can trust – a key characteristic of someone who can build a strong book of business. As a marketing and business development professional, being able to authentically counsel diverse attorneys is invaluable. Here are some techniques:

  • Not having commonalities with decision-makers because of different life experiences is not a make or break situation. You can find commonalities in anything – love for sports? hobbies? pets? You’d be surprised the connections people can make if they listen and pay attention to the person they are talking to.
  • From a poll of the audience, some diverse attorneys may feel that being the token diverse attorney is a negative and does not allow them to be recognized for their skills and experience. Be candid and acknowledge the elephant in the room, but advise them to take the ball and run with it. Encourage them to open up about whether they like the work or prefer to do something different, but they must seize the opportunity.
  • Another common concern is that diverse attorneys are less inclined to ask for opportunities. For marketing professionals, be there to help connect the dots and nudge diverse attorneys to openly discuss what excites them and what they want more of. Diverse attorneys may feel siloed, but you can help connect them with others in the firm who can propel them further in their careers.

© 2020 Berbay Marketing & Public Relations

For more on legal business development, see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.

Coronavirus and Law Firm Event Marketing: Cancelled, Postponed or Just Different?

Given the current circumstances associated with the coronavirus (COVID-19), a law firm has three choices when it comes to executing on their 2020 event calendar: cancel, postpone, or just change the format. My vote would be for you to change the format wherever you can to stay top of mind and relevant to your client base and referral sources while still practicing a responsible form of “social distancing.”

In-person business development and communication through event marketing involves creating an experience that attendees look forward to, get value from, and associate with your brand. Through hosting various types of business development activities, you can set your law firm up as a networking hub for diverse practices, become a thought leader in your legal niche, and establish a history of credentialing activities that will keep you top-of-mind in your legal community. Virtual events for law firms can, and will, do the same.

It is known that law firm marketing has evolved rapidly in the last decade. In a recent study, 67% of legal marketing professionals and 45% of attorneys listed firm-hosted events as one of the most effective ways to get new clients.  Even with all of the new marketing strategies and techniques, face-to-face connection remains one of the most effective ways to network and gain new clients. In the time of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic that is requiring all industries, even the legal industry, to take a second look at how they will continue to operate effectively under quarantine conditions, law firms need to be flexible in how they market. Event marketing can still take place in the spring and summer of 2020, it will just look a little different than originally anticipated. Excluding large luncheons, parties, and galas, for the most part, technology can allow a law firm to move forward with most of their planned events.

Virtual Business Development Events for Law Firms

Every type of business development event attracts different stakeholders, networking opportunities, and ways to strengthen your law firm’s market dominance. Some types of business development activities for law firms that can be transformed into virtual events include the following:

  • Seminars. Conferences that provide training or updates on legal changes in your area of practice. Many seminars and conferences have scheduled downtime and social time, allowing attendees to network and nurture connections that may lead to future referrals. This networking aspect of a seminar can be done in a virtual manner through private chat rooms or even through a special area of your website that allows for “booths” to be created for information sharing.
  • Legal CLE events. Continuing legal education is an essential part of attorney growth, and since continuing legal education is required for lawyers in most parts of the United States, these events offer clear value to attendees. Speakers at continuing legal education events also have the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise, strengthen their image as an authority in their field, and connect with others in relevant areas of practice. CLEs have been webcasted and recorded for years and the coronavirus outbreak really should have no effect on your law firm’s CLEs schedule. All that is necessary to proceed is to tell your audience it will be a webcasted program rather than a live program, hire a professional videographer, and then add then video and handouts to your website.
  • General education events. These events strengthen a firm’s credibility within the community and demonstrate the firm’s expertise to its target client base. For example, an immigration attorney could host an online Q&A seminar through their Facebook page on recent changes to immigration laws and invite affected community members to attend through that medium. An estate planning attorney may host an informal brown bag luncheon that is webcasted on long-term care options to caretakers of aging family members.
  • Brown bag lunch and learns. Lunch and learn events take advantage of the fact that many attorneys have extremely busy schedules. These events last between 30 and 60 minutes and take place over the lunch hour, letting attorneys fit education or networking into their busy day. Brown bag lunches can also take place in a virtual environment. Attorneys can provide a memorable brown bag experience online through the sharing of relevant documents beforehand that they will go over and using screensharing to direct attention of attendees. Law firms will want to make sure that they pay special attention to small things such as consistency in their lawyer screen names and the background portrayed in their videoconference (i.e. what is behind you or what is around you that the other participants will see and does this portray your law firm in the best way possible).
  • Panels. Panel discussions let attendees learn from multiple experts simultaneously. Question-and-answer sessions provide additional value, allowing attendees to get answers to specific, relevant questions. Panels are easy to convert to a digital format. Be sure to have your moderator use the first name of the person that they are addressing when a question is asked as the conversation has to be directed a bit differently than it would in person when you can connect with body language and eye contact. Also, the audience should know beforehand how their questions can be posed and if they are required to have their computer on mute to control outside noise.
  • Collaborations. Collaborating with businesses relevant to your area of practice expands attorneys’ opportunities for networking. For example, an estate planning law firm may collaborate with a senior activity center to help attendees better understand the needs of aging clients, or an intellectual property law firm may run a seminar with a venture capital firm. These types of collaborations can be moved into a digital format by prerecording them for the audience. The business can easily gather questions that come up from attendees and send them to the attorney or law firm afterward so individual phone calls can be made to the guests as follow-up.

Rather than seeing the need to change the format of their existing events to be virtual as a problem, marketing savvy law firms are seeing this as an opportunity. They are utilizing their existing commitments to being modern law practices with functional, time saving technology to continue to connect with their audience. They are using videoconferencing, webcasting, and video recording to continue to host relevant programming for their community. The real challenge in pivoting an event marketing strategy to be entirely digital for the next 3-6 months will be working with the right type of marketing and videography professionals to engage the audience and drive attendance.

Preparation and Follow-Up

Event success, even for virtual events, is more than just choosing the event for your audience. It is critical to have a clear strategy about how to prepare for your event, execute a successful activity, and follow-up to ensure that it is doing the business development work you expect it to.

Know what success looks like. Prior to the event, you should know which benchmarks you want to reach and have ways to measure those. For example, you may want to hit a certain number of attendees, have representatives from a set number of firms, or yield a specific number of networking connections.

Promote your event strategically. Look into different ways to promote an event including traditional invitations through mail or email, social media, and broadcast or print advertising. Be sure to create a custom hashtag to encourage social media engagement before, during, and after the event.

Expect the unexpected. From technology glitches to presenter snafus, being underprepared can end up turning your potential networking opportunity into a PR nightmare. Make sure to give yourself time to work out all the kinks well in advance of your event date and hire a professional to guide you through the process.

Strategize follow-up activities. Following up with attendees after an event provides valuable information on how successful the event was and whether or not it is worth repeating. Some firms use automated email sequences to gauge the results of an event. Reviewing social media engagement, lead generation, attendance numbers, and other metrics provides valuable insight into the success of the event.

Conclusion

Event marketing in 2020 will need to look a little different for law firms but it still remains an effective tool for fostering professional networking and client connections. With the wide range of events to choose from and also the technology available to today’s law firms, there are many options to help firms continue with their previously planned activity calendar. In addition, when law firms are strategic about how they structure, prepare for, and follow up from their virtual business development event, it can be an incredibly powerful form of marketing that is inexpensive, engaging, and memorable.


© 2020 Denver Legal Marketing LLC

For more on managing events during the coronavirus situation, see the National Law Review Coronavirus News page.

How to Get Loyal Clients

For the purpose of running a successful law practice, all clients are not created equal. As a lawyer, a critical element to running a fruitful practice is managing your time in an efficient manner. How and where you invest your time can make all the difference.

As a history buff, I love thinking about government, war, and political change what discussing topics that are relevant in business today. The Declaration of Independence states “all men are created equal.” While this may apply to how we treat others with respect and dignity, we can choose to be more selective with whom we invest our valuable time with.

Invest in Clients Who Have Already Invested in You

Imagine you’re standing in front of an apple tree teeming with fresh apples. Some of these apples are literally right in front of your face, while others are way up high in the tree. For the sake of efficiency, which apples would you select? The lower apples may seem like an obvious choice. And yet, many attorneys are still climbing ladders for those elevated apples. When discussing low hanging fruit with my attorney clients, I always start with a discussion of their existing clients. Our goal is to uncover opportunities, which will produce the highest possible value for the time invested.

As we all know, before you can begin selecting apples you must first plant the seeds and water the trees. As this relates to leveraging existing clients, there is a myth that must be eradicated first. The myth is simple; if you service your client properly, they will be loyal to you. If you believe this for even a moment, welcome back to the ‘80s!

Learn How to Develop Client Loyalty with Intent

Times have changed and so must you in the way you manage your client relationships. Statistically, it’s six times more work and energy to find a new client rather than to keep an existing one. That being said, we all have to step up our game to insure that client loyalty is developed with intent. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to develop a client retention and loyalty plan.

3 Steps to Plan for Client Retention and Loyalty

Before groaning at the idea of writing a plan, I assure you this shouldn’t take more than an hour to accomplish and can make the difference between success and failure in maintaining and building your law practice. Here are the three important elements of a client retention and loyalty plan:

Step 1: Rank Your Clients in a List

Develop a list of your key clients and rank them as an “A, B or C” client. As I stated earlier, all clients are not created equal, so be careful in how you rate these folks. I suggest three qualifiers for determining what makes up an “A, B or C” client.

Ask yourself the following questions about each client — and be honest.

  • How good is my relationship?
  • Can I develop and expand this relationship?
  • Are we friends socially or is our relationship more transactional in nature?
  • Does the client call me for general business advice or just about the deals?
  • Have I helped my client in ways beyond providing legal advice?

Next, try to determine how much opportunity the client has to grow or how connected this client may be.

  • Does the client have a solid network of decision makers that she can introduce me to?
  • Is the client’s company growing and expanding?
  • Are there opportunities to cross-market and share work with my partners?

The last factor in determining who to invest the most time with relates directly to the amount each client has invested with you and if you like or dislike this client.

  • Does this client invest a significant amount of dollars with you or did they invest almost nothing a few years ago?
  • Was this client a complete nightmare to deal with?
  • Did the client cost my firm money due to poor follow-through?
  • Did the client continually question and argue my rate?

Based on these three factors and any others that you believe to be important, invest 20 minutes to create a master list of your top A, B and C clients so that you can move on with step two of this plan.

Step 2: Use the Ranked List to Determine Which Clients to Invest In

Develop a list of contact and relationship building points to help ensure that we are investing the right amount of time with the right clients. Based on their ranking, you are going to do more for the higher-ranked clients and less for the lower-ranked clients. To be clear, if you have a “B” that you want to make an “A” then be sure to increase the amount of touch points with that specific client.

Here are a few examples of different touch points that you can use to develop stronger and stickier relationships:

  • Schedule a lunch or coffee meeting with your client.
  • Go out for drinks and get to know one another better.
  • Send a card on her birthday and for the holidays.
  • Take your client to a game or concert. (It’s important to know what she’s into.)
  • Call your client to see how you can help her business.
  • Email or call your client to congratulate her on something she’s accomplished professionally or personally.
  • Email your client with an article that is relevant to her business. (You can use RSS feeds for this.)
  • Invite your client to a firm event or another high level networking event.
  • Be a resource for your client. Find her a new vendor, strategic partner or an actual new client.

Use these ideas as a guideline to create your “A” column, where a number of these type activities would be used. The “B’s” would receive less contact and the “C’s” less again. For example, you might want to have lunch with your “A” clients four times a year, call each one monthly, email each one monthly and find a solid contact for her twice a year. Again, the “B” clients would get less of your attention and time, unless you want to make that client an “A-lister.”

These are just a few of the many things you can do to stay in constant contact and help ensure longevity with your clients. The side effect of this activity will be to open up more doors for additional business and much needed referrals. The stronger the relationship becomes, the less likely it is that a client will leave over price and the more open to referrals she will become.

Step 3: Make Time to Communicate with Your Clients

While it’s great to set up a plan like this, it’s not worth the paper it’s written on if you don’t implement it. My best suggestion here is to find 30 to 60 minutes a week and schedule time as “client loyalty and development time.” Without making the time and setting it aside, it will never happen for you.

There will always be work and distractions keeping you from this important task. Look at your calendar and find a spot weekly where you are least likely to be distracted or busy. You can even do some of this work on the train, in the evenings or on the weekends.

Develop Client Relationships to Retain Clients

What is a better use of your valuable time: choosing between retaining and developing relationships that already exist and have high potential for growth OR attending local networking events to essentially meet groups of strangers?

Though there is value in both activities, investing time with people who already know, like, and trust you bears fruit much more quickly.


© Copyright 2020 PracticePanther

ARTICLE BY Practice Panther.
For more on legal client management, see the Law Office Management section of the National Law Review.

How Firm Marketing Leaders Can Shake Up the Law Firm “Caste System”

Marketing professionals and other non-lawyers are all too familiar with the age-old hierarchy that pervades law firms and treats attorneys differently from everyone else. Reminiscent of a caste system, this throwback aspect of law firm culture offers attorneys and staff two separate benefits packages, two separate leave policies, two separate dining rooms.

While this system never could have been called equitable, a few professional generations ago firm leadership could provide an understandable justification for it. Law firm staff worked a predictable nine-to-five schedule, while the lawyers put in hundreds more hours per year, working many “all-nighters.” Lawyers’ jobs were highly specialized, while the firm’s non-lawyers performed administrative tasks that were not central to generating revenue.

What a difference a few decades make. Technology has changed the nature of every role within the firm, allowing lawyers to at least assert some work-life balance by working remotely while non-lawyer staff members likely spend longer hours than ever in the office. In addition, today’s forward-thinking firms have expanded the c-suite to include chief marketing officers, chief information officers and chief financial officers. Increasingly they are also hiring internal operations managers and other pricing experts who can speak the same language as the procurement professionals GCs count on to save their companies money. Each of these members of the team bring highly specialized training and skills to their role — and make a measurable impact on the bottom line. And whether managing partners genuinely value their skills, or are simply responding to client demand for their expertise, the result is the same: these professionals now have a seat at the table with clients.

Given this new reality, it no longer makes sense to cling to a law firm culture that renders non-lawyers second-class citizens. And yet old habits die hard. CMOs may finally be getting (a portion of) the respect they deserve, but what about the members of their teams who execute marketing strategy and play a crucial business development role with existing clients?

To be sure, marketing professionals still face an uphill battle in demonstrating their value to firm leaders. But the upheaval in the old system has created an opportunity for CMOs and marketing directors. With the right strategy and messaging, they can use their newfound platform to advance a discussion about firm policies and shed light on the fundamental work of non-lawyer professionals. Here are three ways to get started:

Rebrand your legal marketers as a business development team. Think carefully about how you talk about what you do when you interface with other stakeholders in the firm. Craft your messaging to emphasize the ways in which marketing directly generates revenue. For many large firms, a significant portion of new business comes from expanding engagements with existing clients, and marketers are on the front lines servicing those client relationships and creating opportunities for attorneys to sell across practices.

And make the case with data. Marketing leaders can use many available tools — from the simple to the sophisticated — to collect and process information about their campaigns and initiatives, and understand what really gets results. Firm leaders respect and respond to hard numbers that help them assess how your department is converting firm resources to new opportunities for business development.

Speak up about policies that don’t pass the smell test. The broader culture is extremely sensitive to matters of diversity and equity, and while law firms may be later arrivals to this conversation, their corporate clients are paying close attention. Is the cost savings of a two-tiered benefits package (assuming there is one) really worth the potentially damaging optics of a negative news story on the firm’s throwback culture? Is your diversity and inclusion initiative really embracing inclusion if only lawyers — and not professional staff members — are invited to participate? Legal marketing leaders can use the credibility they have gained to make the case for reexamining problematic policies and suggesting alternatives.

For most legal industry veterans, it’s impossible to imagine law firms that don’t elevate lawyers high above the rest of the staff. And while we probably won’t be saying goodbye to this outdated aspect of firm culture anytime soon, the demands of the marketplace have introduced some much-needed wiggle room into long calcified roles. Don’t miss this opportunity to help firm leaders appreciate the crucial contributions of legal marketers.


© 2020 Page2 Communications. All rights reserved.

For more on law firm marketing, see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.

Law Firms Are Increasingly Using Case Studies to Build Client Trust

Case studies are one of the most powerful forms of marketing communication.  This is hardly a controversial stance; a survey of 600 marketers by the B2B Technology Marketing Group found that case studies were viewed as “the most effective tactic and format”. But while they are widely deployed in the tech industry, case studies are far less common in legal.

That’s changing, as more law firms realize the immense potential. For this reason, case studies were included in the “2020 Legal Marketing Trends Report”, which identifies the year’s most significant developments.

There are many differences between marketing a SaaS platform and marketing a law firm, of course, but let’s look at the commonalities. In both industries, marketers need to demonstrate that a service solves a problem. They need to articulate an approach and show how this provides value to clients.

Too many law firms expend all their efforts telling prospective clients why they are great. Case studies show why a firm is the best choice. They go beyond vague claims about “client service” to show what that looks like in action. They offer concrete evidence that a firm has what it takes to solve complex problems and they do so in the form of a compelling narrative with a problem, a cast of admirable characters, and a resolution.

Why has the legal industry been so slow to embrace case studies? Client confidentiality is a real concern. But often this barrier is less absolute than imagined. Ask your clients—you might be surprised how many are willing to speak openly about their experience with your firm.

It is interesting that law firms, which are built on the expertise of their people, tend to avoid telling stories and putting a human face to their marketing. You can often find more emotive storytelling from a financial tech company than from a corporate law firm. Part of this is the legal industry’s aversion to risk and the widespread belief that it’s better to be safe and boring than flashy and gimmicky.

The truth, however, is that people are expecting more concrete information from the companies and firms they interact with. The internet has trained us to check reviews, rating, testimonials, and case studies before making purchasing decisions. We no longer accept marketing claims at face value. Instead, we look for social validation.

Purchasing legal services is not the same as filling up a shopping cart on Amazon, of course. It’s far higher stakes. This means that social validation and concrete evidence are even more important.

In 2020, we’ll see more firms investing in video case studies. Video production is costly and some firms will have sticker-shock. But others will see the value in investing in core marketing content that can be repurposed for blog posts, newsletters, advertisements, podcasts, pitches, and proposals.

To choose your firm, clients need to know you and they need to trust you. Trust begins with a good story.


© Copyright 2020 fSquared Marketing

For more on building law firm client trust, see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.

Brand Storytelling for Lawyers

Creating a narrative is vital as an attorney. Just as you want to lead your potential jurors or a judge to the kinds of emotional conclusions that will drive the right kind of verdict or settlement, you need to guide your potential clients on their understanding of how your brand was formed. Brand storytelling is the perfect vehicle to connect outsiders with your successes, your story, and your law firm’s core values.

What is Brand Storytelling for Law Firms and Why Do You Need It? 

Brand storytelling blends natural creativity with marketing efforts, establishing a marketing tool that helps firms foster more genuine connections with clients and write a narrative that people remember. As an attorney, you can use this technique to draw in new clients and increase client retention.

Build Emotional Connection

Brand storytelling gives potential clients a way to become engaged with your brand in a personal way—a necessity amongst younger demographics like Millennials and Gen X.

A recent study from Cone Communications shows that 87% of consumers would purchase a product based on values alone. Brand storytelling allows these potential clients to see your law firm as “standing for something” and shows the human side of a brand.

Create a Marketing Foundation 

Storytelling is also a flexible marketing tool. Once you have shaped your brand’s narrative and started utilizing it, you can continue using the dialogue you build with your brand story to engage with people in different ways. Consider engaging through social media to strengthen the connection you have started to create. You can also use the narrative you have crafted to guide content marketing strategies, increase traffic to your web properties, and ultimately improve conversions. For example, a multi-part series produced by a law firm may boost traffic and encourage community engagement with your brand.

Hone Your Core Values

When people choose a law firm for legal services, they want to know that they are part of something that is both bigger than themselves and aligned with their core values. In the process of creating a cohesive narrative about your law firm’s brand and how it has come to be, you have the opportunity to really hone in on those core values—and core clients—that are most attractive for your law firm.

Consider Apple, which has developed a commercial campaign showing its users changing the world and finding their own paths (and using their products along the way). The company has developed a reputation as an innovator and now uses that reputation to frame its customers’ stories in a similar light. By using a similar strategy, you can reinforce your own competence and abilities while still making your clients the focus of your marketing efforts. A good example for a consumer based practice would be the showcasing the journey that a family law attorney helps their client on before, during, and after their divorce.

Key Questions for Developing Your Law Firm’s Story

Writing your story and editing it to suit your audience is a powerful way to change how you market yourself and shape perception of your brand. There are three key questions to consider when you are developing your law firm’s story.

What are Your Goals? 

Although any type of legal marketing has the goal of building your law firm, the reason for presenting your brand story when and how you choose to will depend on the specific goals for doing so. If your firm is experiencing rapid growth, your brand story might be a reflection on successes and celebration of upcoming high-profile projects. If you are in the midst of a rebranding campaign, you may want to change public perception about your brand or give your firm a metaphorical “face lift.” By defining the ideal outcome of your storytelling efforts, you can determine whether or not it is an effective tool for your brand.

What is Your Emotional Hook?

An emotional hook speaks to the character and vision of your law firm’s brand while encouraging visitors to dig deeper and learn more. Explore client feedback to find out how your services have made their lives easier. If you’re an employment attorney, you may find that clients feel supported and validated with you as their attorney. Those working in bankruptcy law may speak to the overwhelming relief their clients feel once they are free of their debt. Always acknowledge the strong emotions your legal services bring out in people. A quarterly case review is an excellent way to find out which cases reflect your core values and drive your brand growth.

How Can You Tell the Most Compelling Brand Story? 

Whether you choose a three-act structure, a compare-and-contrast model, or even tell your story backwards, every brand story should include a few key items: the background of your business, the “characters” that drive the action of your story, the challenges that you and your law firm have faced, and the failures and ultimate successes you have earned. Then, explore the role your brand will have in your community as the years pass, how the brand will evolve and give back, and how clients will benefit.

Storytelling marks a major shift in how law firms big and small are making a name for themselves in the world. Social media and digital technology make pushing this aspect of your marketing out as easy as ever. By telling your firm’s brand’s story in an honest and approachable way, you can show current clients that they made the right choice and win over your future clients.


© 2020 Denver Legal Marketing LLC

Avoiding RFP Mistakes to Win More Business with Matthew Pinn, Principal of RFP Advisory Group [PODCAST]

Sharon:   Welcome to the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst podcast. Today, my guest is Matthew Pinn, Principal of RFP Advisory Group, a consulting company that specializes in managing requests for proposals, RFPs, in the legal industry. Matthew and his company work with law firms in their response to RFPs as well as with corporate counsel who want to use the RFP process to better manage their legal span.  Matthew will share some of his experience in this area with us today. Matthew, welcome to the program.

Matthew: Hello, thanks for having me.

Sharon:   So glad to have you. So, can you tell us a little bit about your background and your career path?

Matthew: Sure, I have a little bit of a unique career path as do most in the legal marketing industry. I actually started my career after graduating from Boston College. My first job was at a talent agent in Hollywood. Yeah, so I worked with a talent agency where we were pitching actors and actresses for film and television roles. So it was kind of an interesting first job. One of the nice things about the talent agency industry, it was a very fast-paced, high-pressure environment and after I had worked there for a few years, it was a really good transition to move from selling actors and actresses over to selling lawyers and law firms. So yeah, it really was. It was a great training ground as my first job, but it really set me up nicely to move into the legal marketing area because I was used to working with some unique personalities in some challenging instances, but my first career in the legal industry was at Latham & Watkins, one of the large global firms based out of California.

So after kind of cutting my teeth a little bit at Latham & Watkins, I then moved back to the East Coast, where I worked under Beth Cuzzone at Goulston & Storrs, a mid-size regional firm in Boston, and I just thought that was great for my career progression. I really got to wear a lot of different hats, but after a few years there, I worked at another mid-size firm, Robinson+Cole, before moving over to what is now K&L Gates. When I first went there, it was a mid-size firm of about 600 lawyers in eight offices, but in the 12 years that I worked there, it grew to a firm that’s one of the largest in the world that ended up—when I left it, it had 48 offices on five continents and nearly 2,000 lawyers. So it was a career path that I think started a little unique in that I didn’t go straight into the legal industry, but once I got in, I did have a lot of experience at different-size law firms.

Sharon:   When you were with law firms, you were in marketing and business development, and you had quite an extensive career it sounds like. What made you decide to focus solely on RFPs?

Matthew: So I think the main reason was I saw a real demand in the industry for people with a certain type of expertise. One of the projects that I worked on when I was at K&L Gates was, we revamped our entire RFP response process globally. So when you have such a large firm like that and you’re responding to nearly 200 RFPs a year, you really need to have a formal process installed in the firm to make that you’re making the most of these opportunities, and as I took a deeper dive into that industry, it timed well with the advent of legal operations and legal procurement.

What we saw was just a tremendous growth in the volume of RFPs that we were receiving and we really needed to quickly identify best practices in order to use this to drive revenue. What I found was I got a lot more involved with both the legal operations and legal procurement side to really learn where their industry was going. I did some presentations with the buy-in legal counsel, where I talked to legal procurement and legal operations folks about how they improved their RFPs from the law firm’s perspective—and how they could ask smarter questions to get better answers from the law firm. So what I realized was that I had developed a strong set of skills based on how to negotiate with corporate counsel and how to respond to put together a winning RFP response.

What I saw in the market though was more and more companies issuing RFPs, but not just the Fortune 100 or Fortune 200 companies.  We saw the same process trickling down to smaller companies and I had a lot of general counsel call me while I was in the law firm saying, “Hey, we’d like to do an RFP. We’re hearing about all the great results they’re getting, but I’m not quite sure how to manage it. Do you have a template? I’m really just trying to learn about how to do something like that.” And so what I realized was I think there was an opportunity for someone like me to work with these companies who might not have a full-time legal operations staff, but who were still interested in using an RFP and then I would also be able to help them manage the process because RFPs can often be time-consuming, and why a lot of general counsel put them off is they just feel like they’re stretched so thin that they don’t have the time and resources to manage the process.

Sharon:   So I think you said it when you said that some legal marketers and lawyers, law firms hear the word “RFP” and they think, “Oh that only applies to large firms. It doesn’t apply to my firm,” if they’re a smaller firm, but you’re seeing something different in the marketplace. Can you tell us a little bit about the work you do on both sides of the desk?

Matthew: Yes, absolutely. We’re seeing a definite change in the market, not only in the volume of RFPs, but also the complexity and the sophistication of them because the people who are issuing RFPs have really progressed in their jobs. So what originally started as procurement at moving in and you had people procuring these RFPs who didn’t understand the legal industry. They might have used procurement to purchase raw materials or other services in a company, but the legal department had always been kind of closed to the procurement group. But what we saw happening was more and more companies were saying, “Why can’t we use the same procurement method in purchasing legal services?”

So one of the changes that we saw originally was really these Fortune 100 and Fortune 200 companies who had massive outside counsel spend budgets. If you have $100 million that you spend on outside counsel, you have a lot of leverage with law firms in pushing these RFPs and it really gives these companies a good chance to not only compare the law firms to one another, but also to really negotiate the prices against each other a bit. When we saw that happening with the large companies, it then trickled down more to the smaller companies, but we saw an added technology that I think has made the evolution a little easier, and what I mean by that is, historically, a lot of RFPs were issued via a Word document and if you’re receiving them and grading them, you were doing it manually and the whole process was time-consuming and not very easy to compare the answers from different law firms. But what happened was there have been companies that have created software that has made it a lot easier for general counsel and legal operations to issue RFPs. There are three companies in particular that have taken over a large part of the legal market—Pursue It, BanyanRFP and RFP360 are three that I see a lot out there. These software programs really allow general counsel or legal operations to much more efficiently issue the RFP because it’s all done through the software program and then when they’re comparing the answers, you literally can see how each different firm answered the same question and they can have multiple people score them and the whole process. The data that’s collected is then already all collected in your software program and that can be used for benchmarking down the line.

The whole process has really evolved with the technology and I think the more and more that technology progresses, the more and more smaller companies will be issuing RFPs, which is why I think you’ll see more and more smaller law firms who didn’t think that they were going to be impacted by the RFP process will now really have to come up with a strategy and plan how to use them. And one other thing on that, the thing I’ve noticed too, is because of the unbundling of legal services—and this is going to impact the solo law firms or the boutique and mid-size ones in competing for working against the larger law firm—is a lot of corporate counsel and legal operations have unbundled their work. So they’ve categorized their work, for example, in categories such as complex bet-the-company matters, core legal services and commodity work, and what they’re realizing is they can use different law firms for different types of work to save money and create cost efficiencies. If they’ve categorized a certain type of their work as commodity work that you don’t need a $1,000 an hour lawyer to work on, historically they might have felt it was easier to just use the same firm for a lot of this work. Now, they’re often using an RFP to compare other options and some of those options are smaller law firms or mid-size law firms or alternative legal service providers. They’re now kind of comparing that work to say, “O.K., we know we’re going to use this Am Law 100 firm for our bet-the-company litigation, but for our filings and for some of the lower-level work, are there other options that are more cost-effective where the value and service will still be up to par?”

You asked me how I’m working with each of the different types, law firms and corporate counsel. So for corporate counsel, I work with them when, for example, they might not have a legal operations or legal procurement team and they might be a legal department of one to ten people, and they just don’t understand the RFP process and they want to have someone come in and manage them and guide them through it. But I also work with, for example, some companies that have no general counsel and one of my clients is that right now where they have no general counsel, but they’re not happy with their current firm and so they’ve said, “Hey, what are our other options,” and because they don’t know the legal industry and the RFP process as well, I basically help them set the table and then help them make the decision as to what might be the best new legal strategy for them. And then for the larger, companies, I’ll work with them more on consulting on specific initiatives that they might have.

For a lot of the larger companies, we’re seeing the convergence method as the number one reason for an RFP. They’ll be using 100 law firms and they’re spending $10 million a year on all 100 firms and they say, “We want to reduce the number of firms we use down to 20 law firms and in that same time, we’re going to try to reduce that $10 million spent to $8 million,” and they typically do that by trading a higher volume of work to get a better price or create more efficiencies.

So, those are kind of the three levels of corporate clients, how they would use my tech service and then for law firms, it’s really just two ways. There are some law firms who will come in and say, “Hey, we want to install an RFP response process. So from the minute the RFP hits the lawyer’s inbox to even after it’s been submitted and you’re collecting feedback, we want to install a formal process so that all the lawyers understand what these opportunities are, what the best practices are and how to kind of manage it as law firm.” And as part of that, I’ll often work with firms on presentations about the latest trends or if they have a specific RFP opportunity—it might be one of their top clients and they don’t want to take any chances.

Sharon:   I suppose that part of that process that you have offered is just helping them decide which ones not to respond to also.

Matthew: Absolutely, I think that is one of the biggest mistakes law firms make these days is they don’t have an efficient evaluation process or what we call a go or no-go process, and particularly at law firms, you’re dealing with owners of a company and multiple owners of a company, and every time a partner receives an RFP, the first thought in their mind is, “Hey, this could be more compensation for me. I can make more money. Let’s give it a shot.” And you have to really take a step back and evaluate each opportunity as to if it’s a go or a no-go and you really want to have that be a firm decision as opposed to an individual lawyer’s decision because sometimes you can have competing interests.

Sharon:   Also, just that RFPs are such a time suck and so intense of time, effort and thought. I mean, you just want to be very judicious about the ones you respond to. So you give a presentation with the five mistakes that law firms make in responding to an RFP and you just said that one of them is just the go or no-go.  What are the other mistakes that they make?

Matthew: Sure, like I mentioned, not having a formal process is what I see as the biggest mistake just because too often if you don’t have a formal process—and what I mean by that is actual formal guidelines too, because if you’re the legal marketer, you need some leverage to push back against opportunities that you don’t think make sense and it’s much easier to say, “Hey, these are the firm guidelines.” You don’t want a partner of a law firm thinking that the BD person is trying to limit their ability to get new work.

Next I think would be the failure to communicate the opportunity internally. So when an opportunity comes to the firm, how is that information communicated and who’s it communicated to? Which lawyers in the firm know about the opportunity? What practice chairs or leaders need to know about it? How does it impact other strategy that the firm’s doing? Are we going after work from a competitor where this might not even be a good opportunity, but you wouldn’t know that if the information wasn’t shared properly? A lot of times, you’ll have RFPs coming into a law firm where you might have 20 different points of entry at a firm with a specific client. If you’re responding to an RFP from that company, you want to make sure that all the people who do any work for that company are aware of it. You also want to make sure that you don’t agree to certain conditions that are going to impact other work that you do in the firm which I see happen frequently with law firms, where they’ll agree to something for a small piece of work and then find out that that same agreement impacts the work in a completely different practice area and they’ll end up losing some money in deal. So that’s another issue.

I think the other mistake that law firms make is their knowledge management system as far as what information they are collecting and extracting from their lawyers and firm management and how that information is making its way into the RFP responses.  For example, all law firms collect representative matters and you might have a bullet about your corporate practice that says, “We represented Company A in an M&A transaction in China for $200 million.” That’s really just a statement, and what RFPs are now looking for is more examples of what makes you different than other law firms. What they want to know is for that M&A transaction you did, what was it about your service that was better than had another law firm been selected? What is the competitive advantage of the value that the client got? And too often, law firms don’t have this information in the legal marketing departments. A lot of it is still inside the heads of lawyers and getting that information from the lawyers into a formal system in your firm that can be used for different pitches is one of the biggest struggles I think legal marketing departments in particular face. They’ll often tell you a majority of the RFP response time was spent chasing down information, and a lot of lawyers will turn around and say, “Geez, I’ve already given you this information,” or, “I’ve already done this,” and so this becomes kind of a constant battle for firms to really manage that data and then turn it into a weapon to help them compete against other firms.

Pricing is a major part of our piece and I think that’s the fourth mistake when it comes to law firms with their approach to pricing. Very often, an RFP will come in and the party that gets it or the team that’s responding to it, might not get to the pricing section until later on down the line and then they’ll realize, “Geez, we don’t have enough information to even provide a fixed fee or to provide a competitive fee against other firms,” and then the Q&A question deadline might already be gone or you’re down to the last 24 hours and you’re kind of scrambling around to see what kind of discount you can get approved from firm management.

The firms that don’t make these mistakes, they’ve either brought in a pricing director who’s usually implemented a system that kind of managed the pricing part of the RFP responses, or even the firms that don’t have that, they often have a committee that approves AFA’s or a committee that will look at the pricing because, oftentimes with pricing, some of the biggest battles we’ll face on the legal marketing side are with the actual relationship partner because they want to give a bigger discount than the firm thinks we should give because that’s that partner’s work and he doesn’t want to lose it, so he or she might say, “Hey, I want to give a 20 percent discount,” and sometimes the firm has to look at that and say, “That’s going to really kill the profit margin on this matter. We think 10 percent is more appropriate.” Those are the types of arguments that we’re seeing in our discussions with law firms. Having a formal system and process in place at least helps you manage those situations a lot more efficiently.

And the last, and probably the most important thing as far as mistakes firms are making is—and there was a survey recently in one of the publications that said 50 percent of lawyers at law firms don’t feel like they can clearly and distinctively pitch their firm’s competitive advantage, and that’s really what RFPs are asking is what is it about your firm that’s better than these other firms, and to a buyer of legal services, law firms look very similar. The questions they get back on RFPs are very similar. Their websites are very similar. We all understand that there are many lawyers who can handle legal expertise and who can handle the legal function of the matter, but in the RFP, they want to know what else makes you different. Is it because of where you’re located? Is it because this is a specialty of the firm? Is it because you know the judge and the courtroom? What is it that we should select you? And I always say the firm should have an answer that when the general counsel gets asked by the president of the company, “Hey, why did you hire ABC law firm,” that’s exactly what your competitive advantage is and that’s got to be clearly defined in the RFP, and too often firms just aren’t compelling with their value proposition.

Sharon:   So you’ve talked about the five questions that a law firm should ask before they even respond to an RFP or before they start—I want to say pen to paper or when they put their fingers to the keyboard. What are the five questions that law firms should ask themselves before they even start?

Matthew: Sure, so the five questions I would suggest they ask are, number one, how did the opportunity originate. Just because there’s an RFP opportunity for your firm does not mean it’s worth the time and resources to go after it. You want to look at things like, “Have we previously done work for the company?”  If you haven’t, the chances of winning the work are significantly lower. At a lot of firms, it might be in the 10 percent  to 20 percent where you’re going to win work, whereas, if it’s a current client, you might be at the 60 percent, 70 percent or 80 percent, so that’s a real strong factor, but you also want to look at the relationships. General counsel moved from the company. Maybe you’ve never done work for the company, but you have worked with that particular general counsel, or you went to law school with a woman who’s now issuing an RFP at a company. So you want to look at pride in their work. You want to look at relationship connections. Are there any contacts in the company? But then you also want to have the ability to understand why they’re issuing the RFP. Are they unhappy with their current counsel? Are they looking to reduce rates? Are they expanding and they want a firm that has more global capabilities? If you don’t know why they’re issuing the RFP, it’s unlikely that you’re going to be able to come up with a good solution to their problems noted in the RFP. So you want to make sure that you at least have access to that information and if you don’t, there are a lot of RFPs that I think are used as stalking horses where they might be happy with their current counsel, but they say, “Hey, let’s issue an RFP and see what other type of information we can learn,” or they’ll use it as a price check and then they’ll go back to their current counsel and say, “Geez, you guys said you could do this matter for $1 million. We think the market rate is closer to $700,000,” and then if they aren’t willing to budge, then maybe you do look at the RFP on the responders, but you want to be careful to make sure you’re not just being used as a stalking horse.

You want to look at, are you eligible? For example, if you’re responding to an RFP from a bank and you’re a small law firm, you might not have the cybersecurity in place to even pass their requirements or you might be conflicted due to certain types of work, so you want to make sure you are even eligible before you waste a lot of resources.

The next one I think is the toughest one to do and that’s, what are our chances of winning? And this again, who’s making the decision as to what our chances of winning are, because if you leave it just to a partner, he or she will often say, “Well, what’s the harm in not responding?” But what you really want to do is say, “What are our chances of winning?” You don’t want a partner who’s going to say, “Well, I want to respond to as many as we can. It’s a good way to get our firm’s name out there.” You really want to know exactly from them, who are our competitors. Is there a realistic chance we’re going to win? Is Nike going to choose a really small firm for their bet-the-company case? Probably not. So you want to have a realistic way to provide feedback so it’s not just from the partner who originated the opportunity, but also either someone on the management committee or practice group chair or the marketing team who might say, “Geez, we’ve responded to 20 RFPs from this company and we’ve never won. Why have we been doing this?”

And that leads to what I think is one of the next things, which is, what resources will be required? There are some RFPs where they might only ask a handful of questions and you can get a response done fairly easily between marketing and the partner, but there are other RFP responses that might require a lot of manual time spent collecting data, filling out forms—some of the government RFPs in particular, you have to fill out a lot of forms and those forms take a lot of time, and does the firm have the bandwidth to spend time on that?

And then, lastly, is the work; if you want it, is it desirable and profitable? Do you think when negotiations are done, that you’re going to be able to come up with a price to do the work where the firm’s still going to make a profit on it and is it the work you want to do? There are evaluation factors when it comes to the type of work. If it’s low-level, commodity work, is that the work that your practice group wants to be known for doing or the firm as a whole, or is it a different type of work? So it’s just something to give consideration as to will this be something down the line that we want to dedicate lawyers in our firm to?

Sharon:   I’m sitting here just nodding my head thinking back on my days of doing a lot of RFPs, responding to RFPs, and when you talk about a system, I’m sure everybody remembers that one that came in. I remember when it used to sit on a partner’s desk beneath a stack of others until the day before and they go, “Oh my gosh, I think there’s something due tomorrow,” and everybody would be scrambling around, so a system is a really great idea.

So what are you seeing for the future in RFPs? You mentioned technology and that makes a lot of sense. What else do you see? You’ve said it’s trickling down to just—

Matthew: I also think what we’ve started to see a lot of now—and I think that trend’s going to continue—is what I call almost pricing audits. So it’s an RFP, but it’s not necessarily focused on your legal capabilities. A lot of times, it is focused just on your pricing and your billing models.

For example, I did an RFP recently for a massive company and they owned a lot of sub-entities and they originally had each entity handle their own outside counsel spends. They created their own deals and their own arrangements. So the master company said, “That doesn’t make any sense. We’re going to do a broad panel for all of our sub-companies and they’re going to all have to agree to our terms and conditions and our outside counsel guidelines,” and they’ll put their rules in these guidelines that firms, if they do work for them, are going to have to abide by, and so, for this particular example, if you are negotiating—originally we had all these smaller deals—so you might have been doing $5 million with one company, $2 million with another, $6 million with another. Once they collected all of them, it was $20 million and then they came to the law firms and said, “O.K., we want really good volume discounts. We’re not giving you $2 million; we’re giving you $20 million of work.”

We’re starting to see a lot more RFPs that are going out really with a price focus and the rise of the outside counsel guidelines is going to continue, and what I mean by that is historically when a law firm and a company would agree to a working arrangement, the law firm would issue a terms of engagement, and basically these were the rules that the law firm said is what you have to follow. Companies have gotten a lot smarter and legal departments have created their own guidelines, and so what we’re seeing in these guidelines is, for example, “We don’t want first-year associates working on our matters.” “You can’t bill more than X hours a day on a particular matter,” or “We want a secondment included with work.”  So basically, it’s a wish list of what these companies now expect from their law firms.  “We want free CLE training,” or whatever their desires are or whatever their complaints are, they’ve worked them into the outside counsel guidelines and they go out to law firms and say, “If you want to do our work, you have to agree to these.”  And so what we’ve seen is a lot more negotiation.

For example, I had one recently where the company asked a law firm for 25 or 30 different pieces of the outside counsel as far as what they wanted, and we went back and forth and negotiated with them and it was determined to be millions of dollars and I think you’re going to see more of that in the future because now you have more counterparts. So instead of it just being the general counsel and the partner, you’ve got legal operations and legal procurement who are now acting as the counterparts to the law firm’s pricing director, business development people, and project management people, and so now you’ve got another layer of communication and connections and I think we’re going to see that grow where those two groups of professionals become a lot more involved in the RFP process and become a lot more efficient in how everything works.

And then, lastly, I’d say one trend I’m seeing a lot now that I think will continue is firms that had the preferred panel providers—they would put preferred firms and say, “O.K., you’re one of the firms on our panel,” but what I’m seeing is, let’s say it’s intellectual property work, they’re asking three types of firms to be invited on their panel and they’re selecting a large global law firm, a mid-size or boutique law firm and then maybe an alternative legal service provider, and when a matter comes up, instead of it automatically going to their preferred firm, they’re saying, “O.K., let’s look at our different options. For this particular matter, what’s the best combination? Is this a bet-the company case where we need to win, so we’re going to use the top choice, or is this something where we think it’s not as high a priority. We think the smaller or mid-size firm could handle that work.” And we’re starting to see more of those types of discussions going on.

Sharon:   That makes a lot of sense.  I want to say the old-fashioned world of RFPs seems to be really changing and catching up, just as law firms are in terms of technology and in terms of leveraging what’s out there today that other industries are already making use of. Matt, thank you so much for sharing this with us today.  I think that’s a lot of great food for thought, and to everybody listening, that wraps up another episode of the Law Firm Marketing Catalyst and if you’d like to contact Matt or the RFP Advisory Group, we’ll have the contact information in the show notes, and if you like what you heard and you would like to hear more, you can subscribe at iTunes or wherever you download your podcasts, and please rate us. We’ll be back next time with another thought-provoking guest who can help move your firm forward. Thank you so much for listening.

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© 2020 Berbay Marketing & Public Relations

KnowIt 2020: Intellectual Property in a Digital World

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THE DIALOGUE AT KNOWIT:

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