management
a false expectation,” says Cherie Olland, the
global director of business development and
communications at Jones Day, and a 21-year
veteran of the firm. “It creates a churn that
has a negative impact because you’ll never
get things to succeed.”
For marketing officers, the frequent
changes of scenery can prove detrimental, too
(though several respondents noted that it is
the best way of bumping up a paycheck). In a
field where crucial relationships take time to
develop, short stays keep marketing officers
from ever obtaining a critical mass of trust
and buy-in from partners. “You need time to
develop credibility, and you need credibility
to implement ideas,” says Elizabeth Zabak,
who has been at her firm, Carlton Fields, for
23 years, and is now its director of marketing
and client development.
Making matters worse is a lack of interaction between marketing officers and the top
decision makers at the firm. Nearly two thirds
of respondents— 63 percent—say they have
just limited contact with their firm’s executive
committee. “Law firm marketers tend to have
a great deal of responsibility with limited authority,” wrote one respondent. “This is very
different than corporate models and leads to
frustration.” For many, however, a closer relationship with the bosses will prove little help:
Only 48 percent of respondents said their executive committees were sophisticated when
it came to marketing.
Yet the survey results—and subsequent interviews with marketing officers—reveals that
the picture isn’t completely bleak. Changes in
the legal profession, and in the way marketing
officers are adapting, are starting to boost the
profile of marketing within firms. It’s an uphill
battle, but strategies and their resulting successes—like Horn’s—are emerging.
To be fair to the partners, law firm marketing is a different beast today than when
they were associates. Traditionally, marketing departments weren’t devising branding
campaigns or initiatives. Instead, they’d fill
requests from the lawyers, who would need
specific materials—not advice or strategy—
on the fly. “They would ask anyone [in mar-keting] for anything, and what you wound up
with was a very flat, inexperienced marketing and sales team,” says Edward Schechter,
chief marketing officer at Duane Morris.
This sort of marketing just doesn’t cut it
anymore; not with clients trying to reduce
the number of firms that represent them to
a smaller core group. Marketing professionals and technologies have moved quickly to
attempt to meet firms’ changing needs. And
on paper, at least, it seems that the lawyers
are on board. Marketing budgets increased
this year at 72 percent of the firms surveyed.
And some projects, such as Web site redesigns and lawyer blogs, do get ready backing,
according to respondents.
But when it comes to more innovative—
and, say the CMOs, more pressing—
initiatives, partners are proving to be something
less than a marketer’s best friend. Consider,
for example, how firms are embracing competitive intelligence. This would seem to be a
no-brainer. If clients are getting pickier about
their lawyers, shouldn’t firms try to understand their current clients and their prospective clients better? Some firms are doing just
that: “It’s the wave of the future, really getting
to know your clients better and understanding their world,” says Barbara Bryant, chief
marketing officer at Alston & Bird, which employs a full-time research specialist to compile
and distill information on clients and prospects. “There are so many ways to gather information on companies—the Internet; investor and industry tools. Law firms are foolish if
they are not incorporating it into their work.”
Yet according to the survey, only 44 percent of firms have a competitive intelligence
expert on staff. Yes, there are a few firms taking a particularly aggressive approach—
recruiting their experts not from the law library
BUCKS FOR BUZZ
Results from Law Firm Inc.’s survey
of marketing directors.
Marketing budgets in 2007
Average
Median
$5,125,729
$3,700,000
Marketing expenses in 2007
Average
Median
$5,552,022
$3,950,000
How 2007’s budget compares to 2006’s
The 2007 budget is larger. 72%
The 2007 budget is smaller. 2%
They are about the same. 26%
CMO compensation (salary and bonus)
Average $265,946
Median $250,000
Is improved firm profitability a factor
in calculating your pay package?
No
45%
(a common practice) but instead from financial services firms that have long mastered the
art. But most firms have yet to unlock the true
power of competitive intelligence because
they have yet to embrace other tools—like
CRM—that could better leverage the data.
It’s not rocket science, either. At Bracewell, one competitive intelligence resource—
corporate news via LexisNexis—is integrated
with the CRM software (InterAction, also
from LexisNexis). So when a partner goes to
lunch with a client, he can type in the contact’s name and see the most recent press releases from the company. This enhances the
firm’s ability to pitch and cross-sell work. “We
may be doing trial work for a particular company, but suddenly we see an opportunity
to do environmental work,” says Bracewell’s
Horn. “We want to know about that. The
data is embedded in InterAction, and it’s all
automatic. Partners can do it themselves.”
The catch, however, is that a lot of partners
don’t want to do things themselves. Getting
CRM systems running requires lawyer time.
They’ve got to go through their Rolodexes
and PDAs and figure out which contacts to
contribute to a central repository, adding information about those clients—like what sort
of work the firm does for them, and what
alerts they might want to receive. Lawyers, of
course, are already pressed for time. The situation explains another finding from the survey: While 62 percent of marketing officers
say CRM software is the most useful tool they
have, they also say it’s been a challenge getting partners on board. Indeed, according to
the survey, CRM ranks as the marketing project most resisted by partners. “All of the large
firms struggle with CRM,” says one marketing officer. “The problem is the upkeep of the
data. You have to get lawyers to continually
update their contact information while they
are busy trying to practice law.”
The no-time-for-marketing phenomenon
can also keep firms from realizing the rev-enue-generating potential of new technologies. Software, for example, can now analyze
e-mail traffic and determine who at the firm
knows someone at a client or prospect company best. This would seem to be an easy approach for finding the right person to pitch
work to. But at many firms, it’s a moot point,
because improving partner presentation
skills has been problematic. While a growing
number of firms are hiring coaches to teach
lawyers how to work a room, or start a conversation by the elevator, many partners are
opting out of the sessions—not because they
don’t believe in them, but because they have
too much work. “These are the lawyers who
are in the best position to pitch clients, but
spending time with the marketing people and
providing information for online and print
materials can be burdensome for busy people,” says a marketing officer. “The people
