How to write for the media

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Posted in: Marketing, Publishing

You might have heard of a new website called JD Supra — it’s essentially an online forum and database in which lawyers register, create profiles, and post court filings, decisions, forms and/or articles, free of charge and free to access. Check it out and see what it has to offer you. The benefits to lawyers include raising their profiles, providing research materials for consumers and other lawyers, and drawing journalists’ attention to a case or matter that the lawyer is working on.

It’s this latter capacity that caught my interest, since I quite like the idea of a service that can bring lawyers and the media together for their mutual benefit. Accordingly, I penned a short article with eight points for JD Supra’s users to consider before posting a document to “The Scoop” section of the site. Some of the specific points apply strictly to JD Supra’s setup, but others are more broadly applicable to lawyers’ press encounters in general, and I think you’ll find the overall principles set out in the article useful for all communications with the media.

This also gives me an opportunity to expound a little on a subject that’s been kind of aggravating me lately: press releases. In my capacity as editor of National, I get between 10 and 20 e-mails every day from law firms, law schools, corporations, and non-profit organizations looking for legal media coverage of one kind or another. If you’re one of the people who sends me these press releases, I’m sorry to report that I actually read maybe one in 25 of them, and I actually act on perhaps 1 in 100. I don’t think I’m especially unique among editors in this respect — editors of larger-circulation publications probably get scores of these e-mails per day and delete most if not all of them.

I don’t think communications professionals in legal organizations appreciate just how much potential downside there is to sending out a press release that’s not targeted, properly calibrated, and part of an ongoing relatiionship. For many people, e-mailing a press release is standard operating procedure, part of the publicity machinery: alert the media to our issue/event/complaint/opportunity. But for an editor, opening up a non-targeted press release is akin to a homeowner getting a telemarketer on the phone or an office worker receiving spam: at best irrelevant, at worst insulting.

Here are a few thoughts on press releases, what works and what doesn’t.

1. Read my publication before contacting me. Every month, a large law firm sends me its list of lawyers who’ve made partner or worked on a big transaction, requesting I place it in our “People on the Move” section, despite the fact National has never had such a feature (and if I can help it, never will), and thereby reminding me every month how little interest the firm has in what we actually do here. If you want to know what “bad publicity” looks like, that’s a good start. Continue Reading

Lawyer blogs vs. law firm brands

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Posted in: Big Firms, Marketing

There’s an interesting discussion in the legal blogosphere these days about, well, legal blogs. James Beck and Mark Herrmann at the Drug & Device Law blog wonder why law firms undervalue blogs, and provide four plausible explanations, three of which relate to demonstrable financial benefit for the firm. Ron Friedmann at Strategic Legal Technology furthers the point about the importance of lead generation for law firms, but he also makes what I think is a key point: the benefits of blogging tend to accrue to the individual author rather than the firm. That has a lot of implications for law firm marketing, and more besides.

I actually don’t think a law firm with more than a handful of lawyers really can blog, because blogging is by definition personal and can only really be performed at an individual, not a corporate level. A firm can set up a number of blogs for its lawyers to write, seeking brand power: a fleet of lawyers all writing great blogs on important subjects under the firm’s letterhead. But these blogs will all have different voices, use varying degrees of formality, address matters in more or less depth, publish at different frequencies — each one reflecting the individual behind it. All that these blogs will have in common is the banner and design.

The thing is, lawyers aren’t cans of Coke: a law firm can’t issue a brand promise about what each and every interaction with its lawyers will feel like. The same applies even more so to lawyer blogs: you can’t brand tone and personality, and a great blog invests heavily in both these things. Blogs, by definition, can’t support a law firm brand.

Cookie-cutter law firm blogs that all read and sound the same, or from which each writer’s personality has been sufficiently excised such that only a bland reporting style remains, don’t build audiences because they don’t strike up relationships with readers. Flat, briefing-style articles on new developments are what populate the newsletters that clients read, skim and discard. You can’t make a connection through a bulletin; but you can connect with a real person, and that’s what makes blogs work.

This is where blogs illustrate the real problem for law firm marketing in the 21st century. Continue Reading

Marketing is about the client

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Posted in: Clients, Marketing

Late last year, in my column at Slaw, I posited the idea of lawyers adopting a client partnership model based on Amazon.com’s customer relationship approach. One of my suggestions was to track a client’s use of the electronic newsletters that law firms send out and use the data to tailor their services to that client accordingly:

If a client receives a general business and corporate e-newsletter but only clicks on and reads the articles pertaining to entrepreneurship while ignoring the items on competition law, her copy of the e-news can be automatically customized to include more of the former and less of the latter. Not only that, but the client’s browsing interest is added to her profile and could prompt a phone call from the lawyer inviting her to a venture capital seminar.

I was pretty delighted, then, to read this article from Law Firm, Inc. this morning, which led off with an anecdote about a Houston law firm’s marketing director and her innovative use of the firm’s existing but underutilized Customer Relations Management software:

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.”

But this innovation success story, unfortunately, was one of the few reported in the article’s comprehensive survey of the state of marketing and business development at the 200 largest American law firms by revenue. The overall sense emerging from the article is that most law firm marketing is like a car stuck in deep mud, with the Chief Marketing Officer pressing hard on the gas pedal but unable to make much headway. Here are some of the reasons for (and effects of) all the tire-spinning: Continue Reading