In search of the great marketing squid

Getting stategic, by Joe Calve

It has become all but axiomatic among the cognoscenti in this odd little sub-culture of ours that there is a Himalaya of a barrier blocking legal marketers from achieving success. That would be the law firms themselves.

I don’t know about you, but this is more than passing strange to me. To give just one example – there are countless others – Richard Marshall, a partner and marketing director at UK firm Lupton Fawcett LLP, wrote in the June/July issue of this very magazine: “[It] is my experience that law firms are particularly difficult environments in which to make marketing work really well.”

I do not mean to pick on poor Richard, but his is a typical expression of a widespread sentiment. Nor do I mean to suggest that the elusive success to which he refers never happens. It most certainly does, and increasingly so.

My point is that Richard, like so many others, is chanting one of the main mantras of legal marketing and he follows, as is the custom, by laying out a few of the usual gripes. Lawyers don’t think like real people do; lawyers live by the sword of professional arrogance and are painfully slow to pay heed to those of us who, therefore, could not possibly hold an intellectual candle to them. You’ve all heard them. Law firms are hotbeds of criss-crossing political agendas and pet projects; they are quagmires of time, sinkholes of money. We all know the litany.

How odd. Many law-firm marketers believe that the very environment in which they have chosen to work is the chief impediment to their success at the toil they have chosen for earning their daily bread. It’s as if a third-rate footballer were heard complaining to the fourth-rate sporting press that the game would be one helluva lot easier, if it weren’t for that agile young fellow standing guard in front of the goal and batting away the limpid blasts.

Not long ago this merely would have bemused me. For better or worse, however, I am now smack in the middle of this thing of ours. Yes, I am only three years in. I have not earned my stripes, as have the grizzled veterans among you, and my shock and awe may, therefore, appear a bit simpleminded.

But I don’t think so. I came into this world with a cynical mindset, having spent most of my career as a legal journalist – writing knowing, insider-ish stories about big law firms while perched safely on the outside, where me and my contemptuous contemporaries would snicker at the marketers who curried our favour, telling one another, “If I ever decide to go over to the dark side, put a bullet in my brain.”

I digress. Clearly, not all law-firm marketing departments perform in the so-called old-school manner. There is plenty of forward thinking afoot. Sylvia Coulter, one of the aforementioned grizzled vets, was recently quoted as saying, “[It’s] time to retire the notion that the legal marketing department is in place simply to internally serve the attorneys, with the pressure, if not the demand, to act like
hotel concierges.”

Few of us would argue with that. Still, I don’t know. Something feels amiss. Maybe it’s a result of the odd circumstances in which I have found myself during my short tenure in the field. I have, in little more than three years, had the ‘opportunity’ to interview, at current count, 117 candidates seeking positions mostly in business development, which, as we all know, is all the rage. (By the way, I would appreciate it if anyone reading this could provide me with a definition of business development
as it applies in the legal marketing setting. I am frequently asked about this and must do better than stutter and stammer. But that’s another column).

Repeatedly, during these interviews, I have found myself scanning the resume at hand – most of these resumes have an almost surreal sameness to them – and asking the day’s well-scrubbed and polished candidate: ‘It seems you’ve been in your current position for only 11 days. Why do you want to make a move?’

The answer is always more or less the same. ‘I’m looking for the opportunity to work at
a firm where I can be more strategic.’ Ah! The magic word. Strategic.

Indeed, the job descriptions we all use are peppered with the magic word (running a close second is ‘proactive’). So it’s hardly surprising that candidates parrot it back
to me. It’s actually quite flattering. They are suggesting, if I choose to read it this way (as, ego being what it is, I do), that my little shop will somehow satisfy what comes across as a craving as powerful as any other primal desire – the appetite, say, for food, drink or sex.

But now I’m at a loss. What does it mean to be strategic in the legal marketing world? I have my thoughts, but what does the candidate think? So I ask the question.

The candidate is ready. She reels off a line of impenetrable jargon that suggests, at least to me, that she belongs at the ‘big table’, where she will toss about ‘big thoughts’ about ‘big concepts’ like positioning, messaging, segmentation, competitive intelligence and the like.

Whoa, I’m thinking, but once you’ve had your big thought for the day (or the week or the month or the year), then what? What are you going to do for the other 69 hours of your week? Update bios? Format pitchbooks? Plan client outings? Sheepishly explain to a certain impossible partner why he failed to make the new edition of Chambers?

Or perhaps you will dig deeply into that alarming pile of papers behind your desk (which is tucked away in a windowless, shoe-box-sized office in an airless corridor beneath a stairwell) and pluck out that strategic plan buried there, dust it off, and read through it. The scales fall from your eyes. What in God’s name were we thinking? Did we really have these meetings? Did we actually agree we would
do all this stuff? Did we do any of it?

And there you have it. Most of us – by no means all – are not wired for the strategic. Being strategic means making hard choices, pushing back, setting priorities, saying no and making it stick. Certainly not most of the 117 candidates sitting before me. In fact, most of them seem to be more akin to what a well-known UK-based consultant to BigLaw, a fellow who actually does think big thoughts, calls, ‘marketing squid’.

When I first heard him use the term, I did a little research since most of my experience with squid has been in the calamari arena. It turns out the giant squid is a fascinating and mysterious creature. It lives in most of the world’s oceans and is among the biggest animals in the sea. But it is rarely seen. It hunts smaller sea creatures, but larger animals feed on it. It is an invertebrate. Most interestingly, the giant squid, when threatened, ejects a blob of black ink that congeals into a squid-like shape that holds the enemy’s attention while the squid turns pale and jets away.

Now, that’s what I call strategic.

Joe Calve is chief marketing officer at US firm Proskauer Rose LLP and can be contacted at jcalve@proskauer.com