Case study: Novack and Macey LLP

Small but mighty

Eric N. Macey offers insight into the marketing and branding campaign that brought the boutique US firm Novack and Macey LLP into the spotlight.

What can a small but successful law firm do when it plays in the big leagues with much larger firms, but does not have the name recognition that its capabilities and professional reputation justify? At Novack and Macey LLP, a Chicago-based litigation boutique with a workforce of over 30 lawyers, a basic conclusion was reached among the partnership. Because we believed we are brilliant at what we do, and we knew that other lawyers in the community believed the same, we concluded that we no longer wanted to be the best little firm that no one knew. We decided to let the rest of the world know about us.
That decision, more than two years ago, was the beginning of a comprehensive, multi-media marketing and branding campaign that was based on the theme ‘small but mighty’, which grew to include:

Direct mail and viral marketing that publicised the images central to our branding;
A co-ordinated public relations and advertising effort in the Chicago media targeted to specific groups;
A complete redesign of our website and collateral marketing materials; and,
Integration of our message into the life of the firm, through everything from branded e-mail to an office contest on new imaging ideas.

We launched this co-ordinated effort in April 2008. A year on and the firm has received an extremely positive response in the legal and general business communities, including securing an award in the ‘multi-media campaign’ category of the 2009 Legal Marketing Association (LMA) Your Honor Awards.

A unique firm
It has been tremendous validation for the firm that I co-founded with my partner Stephen Novack in 1984. We set out to build a different kind of law firm, and when it came time to raise our profile, we decided on a different kind of marketing effort that embodied and expressed who we were as individuals and as an organisation.
From the outset we did not want to be a large or high-volume litigation firm. Our goal was to build a concentrated capability to handle sophisticated lawsuits and appeals for business clients in many industries that need trial lawyers to represent them in important disputes. We have grown by adding lawyers to our team who love the rigours of practice, who get genuinely excited about developing a legal strategy that helps a client and go the extra mile to implement it. Lawyers practice at the firm because the freedom from a bigger organisation allows them to focus on giving clients their full attention, and our consensus decision-making gives them a strong voice in the life of the firm.
Clients choose us because they value the personal dedication they get as a result of our approach and the skills at business litigation that our firm has built. More than half of our new business comes via referrals from other, much larger law firms. We always understood that one of our principal sources of business was lawyers in large firms conflicted out of cases. Thus, we were very gratified when the National Law Journal singled out our success in 2008 by saying: “When major Chicago law firms need a litigator, they often get on the phone to a smaller firm in town that won’t get in their way on the big cases. They call Novack and Macey.1”

Launching the effort
With this kind of backdrop, when we decided to embark on an effort to raise the public profile of our firm, we wanted to address the biggest problem that firms our size have – establishing brand identity. We sought to do something different that would make people take notice. We felt it would be a waste of money simply to have another advert with a picture of a conference table or the firm lobby with a group of lawyers in suits standing in front of the logo. After all, that was not who we were.
The first step in our marketing effort was, therefore, to create an internal marketing committee that consisted of three partners – the former hiring partner Monte Mann, the current hiring partner John Shonkwiler and myself. With their hiring expertise, Mann and Shonkwiler are well attuned to what was positive about, and what was missing from, our image in the legal marketplace. By working collaboratively with everyone in the firm to educate and communicate about our efforts, our three-person committee has from the outset continued to direct the marketing effort.
To provide hands on help, we hired Caroline Berger, who had in her six years with the firm worked on earlier marketing and client service efforts, to take on the full-time position of marketing coordinator reporting to, and working closely with, the committee. After interviewing a number of marketing consultants, the committee decided to engage Ross Fishman of Chicago-based legal branding firm Fishman Marketing to create our campaign. They are a nimble, well-regarded group, but perhaps even more important to us was that their approach is fresh and innovative. ‘Stuffed suits’ was not the image we wanted for Novack and Macey, and Fishman Marketing understood that from the outset.

Positives and negatives
We began with a shared understanding that our firm has a strong reputation, but not enough potential clients knew about us. Our marketing and branding objective was therefore to showcase who we are and why our firm is a great alternative for high-end business litigation. With the committee and Fishman Marketing working together, we developed a strategic plan focused on Chicago-area law firms and middle-market business owners. Our four key goals were:

To reinforce our reputation as a firm, not just as individuals;
To develop brand recognition not only as an outstanding litigation firm, but as a safe choice for major clients who needed to justify going with a smaller firm;
To increase revenue by ten per cent; and,
To increase website traffic.

Despite the advantage of having a positive reputation and good performance history, we faced some marketing setbacks. Perhaps the greatest obstacle was the fact that the firm had never before invested substantially in external marketing or public relations campaigns. Our marketing collateral materials were therefore minimal, as was our first-generation website. As a result, some partners were sceptical about what a branding campaign would accomplish. We were also wary about spending an extraordinary amount on the marketing campaign simply to convince ourselves that we were doing something. Fishman Marketing took all this into account as it began researching and planning. They conducted hour-long interviews with all of the partners and most associates, seeking to define a unique message. They analysed our business trends to identify target audiences and business sectors. And they conducted dozens of telephone calls and meetings with clients, prospects, and lawyers to learn more about the firm’s reputation, differentiators, and competitors. The result was the ‘small but mighty’ brand identity. The message was that, although small, our firm is as skilled as much larger firms and often is a better choice because of our unique approach to cases.

Launching the programme
Fishman Marketing then took the next step of identifying three visual images from nature that reinforced the branding tagline – small things that were disproportionately strong or powerful.
These included:

The pea-sized tepín pepper, the hottest in the world;
The rhinoceros beetle, which proportionately can lift 850 times its own weight; and,
The poison dart frog, a tiny but toxic creature that can kill whoever touches it.

By early April 2008, the brand messages and images were being incorporated into our website and into a planned advertising and public relations campaign that were scheduled to begin simultaneously in late April. An aggressive launch of the advert campaign was crucial, so we opted to front-load the advert placements in major Chicago-circulated legal and business publications over the first few weeks instead of trickling out the campaign over a long time.
Each of the three visual images (outlined above) was the subject of an advert (see Figure 1) and for maximum impact we ran all three adverts on sequential right-hand pages. Two adverts with the beetle and frog images ran only with our firm logo. The third advert, featuring the tepín pepper, stated our marketing message. This was:

“Some of the world’s most potent forces are also the most concentrated. While some say there is safety in numbers, we say a small but mighty force can move mountains. And we prove it every day, on some of the most sophisticated legal issues around. Get to know Novack and Macey and see the practice of law at its highest concentration.”

For the firm’s official brand launch, we sent 2,500 packets containing Mexican tepín peppers with our logo and message on the package to targeted clients, friends of the firm and prospects. We also staged an ‘open house’ for the media to publicise the campaign, at which my partner and fellow marketing committee member Shonkwiler ‘took one for the firm’ by actually eating a tepín pepper in front of the assembled attendees (he survived). In a viral marketing effort, we placed the firm’s new logos on taxidermied four-inch rhinoceros beetles and put them around the city in high-traffic areas, from Chicago’s O’Hare Airport to locations near courthouses and banks. The combined buzz was immediate, and all we could have hoped for. At the same time we made certain that everyone in the firm was involved in the life of the campaign, and held staff meetings to explain what our goals and objectives were and why we chose to pursue them in this manner. Another step that served to reinforce the firm’s message was our firm-wide implementation of branded e-mail templates, which ensured every e-mail that anyone sent out carried our new logo and a link to the updated website. This web-enhanced e-mail programme has driven our online visibility up considerably. And the involvement of all our staff in the campaign has continued. This year we held a contest to propose and select a fourth ‘mascot’, which resulted in the blue ring octopus, which is the size of a golf ball but is the most venomous of its kind anywhere, being incorporated into the campaign
Speaking of the importance of such efforts, Berger said: “All of us at Novack and Macey take the success of the firm personally. The way the marketing campaign has been handled reinforces that it belongs to everyone, not just the partners and the marketing committee.”

Assessing the results
We were tremendously pleased with the recognition that our campaign received from organisations such as the US-based Legal Marketing Association, but more important in our view were the tangible, real-world benefits that we tracked and measured. These included:

Financially we had our best year to-date as a firm, with revenue increasing by ten per cent – a fantastic result in a down economy;
In direct competitions with other firms, we were selected specifically because of our advert campaigns;
We received new business directly from our tepín pepper mailing, including from one of the world’s largest energy companies;
We were profiled in major national industry publications, including the National Law Journal and the American Bar Association’s Law Practice magazine, which directly or indirectly referenced our campaign; and,
We have tracked substantial increases in unique visits to our website.

Almost as impressive as the results outlined above is the fact that the entire marketing and branding effort was carried out on budget at less than $150,000 for the initial campaign (exclusive of the advertising that we continue in our targeted publications). It is an expenditure that we deem well worth making, as our firm has continued to grow and prosper while other larger and more established ones have fallen by the wayside in a tough environment. Best of all, the campaign was not like a sauce intended to make a bland dish more interesting. Rather, it was an innovative approach that captured the essence of who we are as a firm. Marketing does have a cost – but so does anonymity. And for Novack and Macey LLP, it was an expense that enabled us to broadcast our story to the rest of the world.

Eric N. Macey is co-founder and partner at US firm Novack and Macey LLP. He can be contacted at emacey@novackmacey.com

References

National Law Journal, Novack and Macey: A ‘law firm’s law firm’, December 2008