Tag: millennial

Three Messages Next-Generation Recruits Need to Hear from Law Firms

By sheer numbers, millennials make up the largest generational group at midsize and large law firms today. Within the past few years, the oldest members of that generation began reaching partnership, and soon they will take over leadership positions as well. But the transition hasn’t been easy. Law firms know they must adapt in big ways to recruit, motivate and retain these lawyers, while at the same time working to stay relevant to firm clients. After all, the majority of legal services buyers will soon be millennials too.

Firms understand what matters to these younger lawyers; meaningful work, equity and inclusion, and work-life balance are all factors that determine where they choose to build their careers.

Most firms are at least beginning to reimagine some of the ways they do business in order to accommodate the needs of this new generation of lawyers. But not all law leaders grasp the important role communication strategy should play in their efforts to modernize. You might be taking the right steps, but how are you talking about that work with your target audience?

Here are three messages your firm must express:

 “We have a plan to make our firm more diverse and inclusive.”

Millennial lawyers know that most firms have been talking about diversity and inclusion for years without making much progress on advancing women, people of color, LGBT lawyers and lawyers with disabilities. They want to work for a firm that goes beyond lip service to articulate a plan of action and ambitious benchmarks that will hold leadership accountable for leaving the country club culture behind. What does that look like?

  • Provide PR support for diverse attorneys to help them build their profiles and develop business. Deploy your communications resources strategically to shine a light on your firm’s future superstars.
  • Address pay equity and the need for change. Millennials value authenticity, and they interpret silence on issues like this as complicity with unfair practices.
  • Demystify networking. Business development training and participation in professional associations can help these lawyers build their business in ways that feel natural and effective.
  • Equalize access and opportunity. How do cases and matters get staffed at your firm? Do you have a method for fairly distributing work and making sure a wide swath of your attorneys get to take a crack at high-profile work?

“We want you to have a life outside work — really.”

Millennials are more skeptical of institutions than past generations, and that means they are pretty good at spotting empty promises. So in order to appeal to these lawyers, your firm will have to get beyond platitudes and commit to specific policies and initiatives that encourage and protect work-life balance. How can you convince them you mean it?

  • Embrace flexible scheduling. Firms that will not budge on schedules virtually guarantee that parents — and women more often than men — will be forced to make impossible choices between their children and their career.
  • Destigmatize parental leave. Men and women both risk being viewed as “out of the loop” or not sufficiently committed to the firm if they choose to take time off after their babies are born, and that can have real negative consequences for their careers. Hold up and celebrate cases of men in leadership who take parental leave. Make it the new norm.
  • Address mental health issues head on. By now we’re all familiar with the alarmingly high incidence of depression, substance abuse and suicide among attorneys. Millennial lawyers want to know firms are not sticking their heads in the sand when it comes to mental health.

“We want you to succeed.”

Enduring and succeeding in the survival-of-the-fittest law firm culture may have been a badge of honor for generations past, but not for millennial lawyers. This cohort values collaboration and fairness more than gaining a competitive edge on their peers, and forward-thinking firms will adopt new policies and practices that assure millennial lawyers the game is not rigged. How can you communicate your support to these associates and younger partners?

  • Make your billable hour expectations transparent. According to the Young Lawyer Editorial Board of the American Lawyer, associates just want their new firms to be straight with them about how many hours they are expected to bill. And they don’t mean the published hours requirement.
  • Take mentorship seriously and prepare young lawyers to take advantage of it. Mentorship programs succeed when firms devote time and resources to them, and when they make thoughtful decisions about which partners should participate. (Not everyone is cut out to be a mentor, and that’s okay.)
  • Consider a sponsorship model. Sponsors move beyond the traditional mentoring engagement to advocate for their protégé. This may mean expanding the perception of the kind of work the lawyer can take on, brokering connections with other partners or with clients, or advocating when it comes time to staff cases. A sponsor uses his or her power and access to ease the younger lawyer’s advancement, particularly if that younger lawyer is a woman or other minority in the firm.

Firms who get their messaging right — and implement policies and processes that back those messages up — will be well-positioned to recruit the best and brightest next-generation lawyers.

© 2020 Page2 Communications. All rights reserved.

For more on the law firm workforce, see the National Law Review Law Office Management page.

How Millennial Lawyers Are Pushing Firms to Rethink the Role of PR and Messaging

Law firm management experts and industry watchers have spilled a lot of ink in the past decade about how millennial lawyers are different from the generations of lawyers who came before. The millennial perspective has shone a light on aspects of the job that older lawyers assumed could never change — the inflexible schedule, the grueling and lonely path to advancement, the lack of diversity that seemed baked in to the law firm model — and the industry has begun to change.

And while nurturing strong client relationships and providing excellent service used to be the only marketing plan a law firm needed, the values — like equity, transparency and authenticity — of millennial lawyers are one of the major pressures now forcing firms to rethink the role of PR and messaging.

Forward-thinking firms are responding to this call for change by tacking some big questions:

What’s our firm’s story?

Prospective clients and recruits respond to a compelling narrative that communicates your firm’s identity to the market. And that story must be built on the needs of the client rather than the needs of the firm, as the typical firm’s story was (even if by default) in decades past.

Crafting that story requires developing a deep understanding of what clients care about. What keeps them up at night? What challenges will they be facing a year from now that haven’t yet occurred to them? How can the particular skills and expertise of your attorneys serve these needs? And, most importantly, how can you make that case to the client? Armed with this deep knowledge of what their clients want and need, firm leaders can then harness the power of all available channels of communication to tell the story of what makes them different, and spotlight what they have to offer.

Who is our website for?

The role of websites has changed. A decade or two ago, many established firms embraced the need to simply have a website, assigned the work of maintaining it to the marketing and IT departments, and continue to spend a fortune keeping it up to date. Unfortunately, too many firms operate on automatic pilot when it comes to thinking about who visits their website and how they use it.

Modern law firm websites are not really marketing tools. They don’t “sell” the firm because the chance that the website is the primary entry point for a new client is pretty low. Instead, firm websites are communication tools, and the audience is not clients but potential recruits and laterals, opposing counsel or co-counsel, and judges and clerks. Understanding that a website is not a selling tool but a way to share information about your firm should shift your approach to the content. Your website should showcase key aspects of your firm. In addition to well-written biographies of your attorneys that feature their backgrounds and areas of expertise, the website is also the place to highlight important aspects of your firm’s culture and focus on team members of diverse backgrounds.

Who should speak for our firm?

You think strategically about the partners best positioned to respond to client proposals, and you should give the same consideration to whose names you’d like to see in the legal media representing your firm. Good PR should raise the profile of particular lawyers for strategic reasons and leave nothing to chance. When a reporter calls to ask about your new parental leave program, who should answer those questions, and why? Who could credibly write a thought leadership piece on the importance of sponsorship and mentoring? What about a column on a new tax incentive clients should consider taking advantage of?

The story of your firm — your culture and who you aspire to be — is shaped by which attorneys are telling it. Your top billers and client wranglers are not necessarily the same folks who should be the voice of your firm in communications. Firms must define and assign these important roles.

Is our messaging consistent?

You worked hard to develop an outward-facing message that would attract and recruit new attorneys and lateral hires. But now that they’ve joined your firm, does your internal messaging match what they saw when they were on the job market? In many firms, human resources handles internal communications. While this department may be doing a fine job distributing important information to your employees, retention and integration of millennial lawyers depends on continuing to communicate your firm’s values and goals in authentic ways. Employee communication should reflect the strategic vision of the firm’s top leadership.

An internal newsletter, for example, should be about much more than just upcoming office events and changes to your benefit plans. It should celebrate staff promotions (linking the work employees do to the greater firm mission), positive results for clients and recent business development wins. It’s also the place to feature diverse members of the firm, promote mental health initiatives, showcase a male partner taking parental leave, link to professional development and nontraditional networking opportunities inside and outside the firm, and more.

Attracting and retaining millennial recruits, and understanding how to serve millennial clients, are two of the biggest challenges today’s law firms face. But this is also an exciting opportunity. When you understand what this cohort values and communicate those values via the same kind of high-production, well-packaged content that millennials expect in all areas of their media-rich lives, your firm will be well positioned to meet the challenges of this current moment.

© 2020 Page2 Communications. All rights reserved.

For more on improving law firm PR & messaging, see the National Law Review Law Office Management section.