The American Lawyer - February 2008

management
Still a
Tough Sell
Law firms may be warming up to
marketing, but plenty of institutional
roadblocks remain.
By Alan Cohen

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WHEN WENDY HORN JOINED HOUS- ton’s Bracewell & Giuliani as its director of marketing and client relations, one of the first things she noticed was the way the firm was—and wasn’t—using its customer relationship management software. Of course, most law firms have yet to even install CRM packages—a standard technology in just about every other sales-driven industry. So the fact that Bracewell & Giuliani was using it at all was a solid first step. But after 20 years in law firm marketing, Horn knew that the firm could be doing more than simply managing client contact data; it could be using CRM in sophisticated ways that would generate buzz—and business.

So Horn ratcheted things up. She set the CRM system so that whenever the firm e-mailed clients a newsletter, it tracked which articles were opened by which recipients. This enabled Horn to home in on the topics that were most interesting to specific clients. She then centered her marketing efforts around these hot issues— a client alert devoted to climate change, for instance, or a seminar on intellectual property. The result: The more focused her marketing efforts became, the more phone calls the firm’s partners received. “We’ve sent out more than 500 items this year—newsletters, invitations to conferences, and so on,” says Horn. “At least 10 percent have directly produced work.”

In just about any other type of business, an episode like this would be standard operating procedure. But in the world of law firm marketing, it is cause for celebration. Unintentionally, firms are doing everything they can to ensure that scenarios like this never happen. At least that’s what we discovered in a comprehensive survey of law firm marketing officers at Am Law 200 firms conducted by Law Firm Inc., a sibling of The American Lawyer.

Marketing success stories exist, but they’ve been overshadowed by a litany of problems, complaints, and challenges: partners who have little appreciation of, or time

for, marketing; unreasonable expectations of what initiatives can reasonably be expected to deliver—and how soon; a management structure that gives the chief marketing officer many bosses but little authority; and perhaps most damaging of all, a culture where resistance to change and aversion to risk is ubiquitous and powerful.

There is, as one survey respondent wrote, “an inevitable clash between the careful ‘precedent-driven’ nature of lawyers and the ‘we should be the first to do this’ drive of marketers.” Indeed, 62 percent of respondents said their job would be easier if partners had a better understanding of what marketing entails.

These problems aren’t just creating missed opportunities; they’re creating unhappy marketing officers. Nearly a third of those surveyed— 32 percent—expect to be job hunting within five years. Perhaps that’s not surprising, given that 38 percent lasted less than four years in their previous job. But the alarming turnover, say some marketing officers, isn’t due only to frustration. It can also be blamed on partnerships that don’t realize that results take time and, as a result, pull the plug on their marketing chiefs too soon. “Lawyers think that marketing means getting work tomorrow,” says one respondent. “But marketing is about positioning. You’ll get work, but it may be three years down the road. Lawyers don’t understand that.”

For firms, the impatience can be self-defeating. “[The thought] that one person is going to come into a partnership and change the world in a short amount of time is