In the driving seat

by Jason Parkman

Changing client demands and increasing competition between law firms has seen the influence of marketing grow strongly within all business divisions of a firm. In the struggle to establish true competitive difference and win new business, law firms are placing a high priority on information management. And it is marketing that is at the wheel – driving the creation, collection and appropriate communication of company and market information, aimed at steering the organisation along a profitable path.
The list of tools at the disposal of marketers to manage this task has grown exponentially in recent years. Proposal generators, experience management applications, targeted mini-sites, industry blogs, e-mail marketing campaigns, RSS [really simple syndication] feeds and podcasts, to mention a few, now form the backbone of marketing technology programmes at leading international law firms.

Technology provides tactical reach
In many instances it is the rise of these new communication technologies that is driving the interaction of different departments within a firm. Take the creation of client proposals, for example. Generating them is an iterative and cooperative process that reaches horizontally across a firm. As custodians of this process, it is up to marketing to create the cross-functional teams and establish the workflows that facilitate lawyers, human resources (HR) staff and finance managers to contribute their pieces to the marketing system.
These days, client proposals are no longer purely focused on explaining the type of work a firm is able to perform. In the past they were concerned with celebrating the education and experience of their lawyers. Today, along with the above, a proposal must explain the culture of the firm itself. Information about a firm’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme and the type of employment diversity it encourages is just as important as illustrations of the successful work the firm has undertaken.
Clients who have their own corporate responsibility requirements are driving this change. Large organisations, particularly in the UK, are increasingly judged by the type of company they keep and only wish to do business with suppliers that have similar diversity and social responsibility measures in place.
To assemble this type of information, law firm marketers must interact closely with management and HR. The smart firms, having gathered the information, use it as a device to win new work. Addleshaw Goddard and Clifford Chance are leading exponents of this approach, with mini-sites devoted to their CSR programmes.

New financial imperatives
Another important part of the proposal process that requires marketing to move across business divisions within the firm is the information provided about billing. Having a flexible approach to fee structures and providing unique billing arrangements can be the difference between a firm’s success and failure in winning work. The willingness of firms to offer specially-tailored fee structures is a reflection of how competition for work among firms has increased.
As the number of clients implementing preferred provider programmes increases, firms are typically bidding for a whole book of business from a client, rather than for work on individual matters. In response to this, clients are applying traditional procurement processes to legal services and expect flexible fee structures and negotiation around the lifetime cost of the professional relationship. The ability to articulate a willingness to cooperate in this manner at the proposal stage is vital, and calls upon marketing to interact smoothly with the finance function of the firm.
International firm Sidley Austin LLP is a good example of a firm that has moved further than most along this course. Its chief marketing officer has seconded two people from the marketing division to work directly within finance. Their responsibility is to provide all the financial information necessary for inclusion in client proposals. In this way, the firm can move quickly when an alternative approach to fee structure is called for, putting the decision-making power directly in the hands of the people who are going out to win new business.

Breaking down solution barriers
Firms increasingly employ technologies that integrate marketing functions with traditional practice and financial management systems and, as a result, information flows back and forth between departments. This type of integration enables information to be shared and analysed from a range of perspectives and is helping break down the information silos between finance and marketing systems. Both contribute their parts to a greater interlinked whole ? what we could call an overall knowledge management system, in which the value of new deals can be assessed for both marketing and profitability purposes.
A good example of this in practice is the opening of a new matter. Previously this was a function of the finance team, but with the integration available in modern law-firm management systems, the process of establishing a new file is now very much a collective one. The description of the work, who it is for, and the type and size of client are essential ingredients to the file. This is information for which marketing is often responsible for collecting and the process continues along the lifetime of the matter. Billing information about the matter and the lawyers that carried out the work are important from a future marketing perspective.
An experience-management application that can be plugged into the financial system lets firms quickly search and find this type of information, enabling them to build and maintain information dossiers that can be served up on a variety of communication platforms.
There is a range of tools helping to make this collaborative process as seamless as possible. Modern proposal software, for example, enables different business departments to work separately on completing their designated parts of the proposal within a single integrated system. These systems can also create workflows that put in place reminders and escalation procedures to ensure that the right people are assigned to complete their tasks by certain dates.

Information – right here, right now
Another way marketing departments are seeking buy-in from their work colleagues and streamlining the process of information creation, is ensuring that content can be accessed and contributed to using familiar workplace tools. Many UK firms are using technologies similar to Microsoft Sharepoint to aggregate content into an intranet – an environment that lawyers commonly work within. The creation of proposal or experience pieces can be done within the native application if necessary, but turning appropriate pieces of the application into web parts and putting them on the firm’s portal enables lawyers to create, contribute and approve content in an environment that encourages participation in the process.
Lawyers spend a great deal of time working within e-mail applications so it is often a valuable exercise to augment the information available through that avenue. Contact management is a good example. You can have the greatest customer relationship management system in the world but, if lawyers refuse to use it, contact management becomes impossible and a rich resource of information is neglected. In contrast, if you can encourage them to maintain their contacts within the familiar e-mail application and then link to it using integration technologies, a new avenue of information becomes available.

The expanding role of marketing
As the range of technologies available to law firms expands, so must the skills of the marketers who drive them. Today, the successful marketing professional must be comfortable conversing with IT professionals and lawyers, and happy speaking the language of HR and finance. Online marketing has proved itself to be one of the most successful marketing tools available, but it is often partially funded and supported by an internal IT team. A working financial knowledge of budgeting processes is also becoming an essential part of any marketing professional’s skill set.
Law firm marketing spend is increasing worldwide, providing further evidence of its growing influence. On average the top-100 US firms are growing by 10 per cent per annum, but marketing spend outstrips this significantly at 30 per cent. Not all of this increasing spend is being used to buy advertising space or on client entertainment; it also reflects the fact that law firms are starting to re-classify different types of business functions under the marketing umbrella. Therefore, marketing is regularly assigned responsibility for business development, strategic planning, alumni outreach programmes, becoming more heavily involved in recruitment, and plugging into the client matter intake process.
Working daily with law firms on new technology and marketing makes these integration trends easy to identify. These days, when a firm calls on Hubbard One to rebuild its web presence, our interactions with the firm begin with marketing, but quickly move beyond that as we engage with purchasing groups, management committees and senior partners. The scope of people we work with has expanded, as firms grasp the fact that a marketing exercise, such as a website redevelopment, can provide a lightning rod to look at strategic issues within the firm. As the website is a law firm’s public face, it needs to provide an accurate insight into all aspects of a firm including brand, culture, work experience and organisational structure. And it is marketing, with its kitbag of web-friendly technologies, that is contributing heavily to making that happen.

Jason Parkman is vice president, general manager at Hubbard One, a Thomson Elite business, which provides creative, technology, consulting and implementation services. For further information, visit www.hubbardone.com or e-mail elite.enquiries@thomson.com.