Law firm marketing in need of marketing

This is not something I ever imagined myself writing but having looked at this week’s Career Clinic, I’m feeling grudgingly moved to defend the noble art of marketing at law firms.

For those that haven’t seen it, a two-year qualified solicitor who hates fee earning asks if they should go into business development, only to get a load of replies to the effect that BD is a waste of time and doesn’t do anything for law firms.

Having met a lot of marketing professionals in my time - in agencies, in-house and, yes, at law firms – I'll have to respectfully disagree. True, I have spent a good chunk my time ignoring and avoiding marketing professionals because that’s part of my job. It's not because they are no use to law firms – it’s just usually they are not much use to me.

The bottom line is that effective BD, marketing and PR do contribute a lot to law firms and, conversely, poor teams can be greatly damaging. This is most obvious on the external coms/press side – on one memorable occasion in recent(ish) years a cack-handed media operation at a major City firm substantially contributed to a story spinning so wildly out of control that (and management in the firm admitted this to me) it de-stabilised the firm to such an extent there were genuine fears for its future.

But it also holds on the BD, marketing and branding side, even if the benefits are more subtle. Often you find that there is a correlation between forward-thinking and entrepreneurial law firms and good BD. It’s a cultural thing; can-do, business-winning lawyers often want to work with similarly-minded support teams.

Interestingly, in the legal sector, when it works, it usually happens in-house. External marketing and PR agencies are well known for being abysmal at handling law firms, largely because they can’t be bothered to tailor models built around listed financial services clients to a partnership (to be fair, there are some notable exceptions emerging).

Of course, there are plenty of thoroughly unimpressive people working in law firm marketing but this tends to make the strong teams stand out even more. I would even say a good marketing/BD/PR operation adds more value to a large law firm than any individual partner, no matter how respected. And while, there is no point reading too much into these things, you have to give the marketing team at Eversheds a pat on the back after the firm this week ranked above many of the City’s top firms in the latest Superbrands survey.

You can criticise some of this as superficial but that misses the point. In an information-saturated age, there isn’t always time for nuanced, complex communication, so 'superficial' can fit the bill if it gets the basic message out there.

Interestingly, you can spot a definite change in attitudes to marketing at top UK firms, which are clearly taking the whole marketing issue more seriously than a few years back. At a time when City firms want to build and institutionalise their brands, it would be weird if they didn’t take it more seriously.

Still, I’m sure some rogue marketing bod will massively irritate me in the next 10 minutes and I’ll bitterly regret penning all of this.

alex.novarese@legalweek.com