Profile: Julie Murphy

While she may still be in the early days of her legal marketing career, Julie Murphy has benefited from an increasingly sophisticated attitude towards marketing among lawyers and partners. So, her continued focus on the client and outsider experience are paving the way for success. By Kate Clifton.

If there are any firms that still harbour the view that individuals from non-legal backgrounds do not have the knowledge to successfully take a practice to market, then Julie Murphy, marketing director at UK firm Mills & Reeve, is further proof that this is not so.

Before she was appointed to the role in 2003, Murphy gained her marketing experience at corporate organisations, including Tesco and Whitbread.

She noticed a few differences between the two sectors at first, not least the time taken to justify, gain support for and complete projects, which would often take longer in legal marketing.

The main change that Murphy has seen since joining the firm, is that her role – and that of her marketing team – has become increasingly strategic, particularly over the past two years. The firm is more sophisticated in how it uses marketing, so everyone has grown alongside that.

Perceptions of the marketing department, too, have evolved since Murphy took over the reins, which is a huge relief for her, as well as proof that the determination and focus of the marketing function is finally being recognised.

She recalls the days when her team was viewed, by lawyers, purely as low-level event organisers; the people who walked the floors handing out drinks. Often the most ‘concerned’ e-mail that she ever received was from a partner, checking that the Pimms was on ice for the next event.

“That doesn’t tend to happen anymore,” says Murphy. “Now, we’re increasingly seen as people that can actively advise and coach partners and fee-earners on how they should work with clients and targets, as well as the best forms of service delivery, communications and events to attract those clients and targets.”

Throughout her career, prior to joining Mills & Reeve, Murphy spent a large amount of time working – as a client – with numerous law firms, including niche boutiques and larger global firms.

As a result of her own experiences, she has developed a very strong, client-focused ethos and concentrates most of her attention on the firm’s existing client base, which, she says, has remained loyal across all of its regional offices and in the City.

Her team is passionate in its endeavours to ensure that the firm delivers the services clients expect, in the most appropriate way. And it is here that Murphy believes the real challenge lies.

“Their [clients’] marketplace and environment is changing and so are their requirements,” she says. “It is critical to constantly stay on top of what types of advice our clients need and how they want it to be delivered.”

Her approach to this is refreshing in a market that has only recently come to terms with the fact that technical excellence is no longer enough to sell a law firm to increasingly demanding clients.

And it is here that Murphy’s outsider experience within commercial businesses, as well as her down-to-earth, logical nature, shines through. She is a firm believer that the only way to ensure that the client remains completely satisfied with the service they are receiving, is if that service is completely relevant and tailored for them. She strongly advocates getting into the mindset of the client, through building strong relationships, gaining knowledge of the business and its sector, and research.

“It stems from having been a client of lots of law firms in the past,” she says. “It’s about thinking about everything from their perspective, rather than ours and then trying to reinforce that level of appreciation and empathy with our fee-earners, many of whom have never found themselves in a ‘normal’ business environment. In this way, their understanding of the commercial reality of people’s businesses can be improved.”

This thinking has led Murphy to re-assess her existing client-care programme and, 18 months ago, she recruited people into her team that could concentrate purely on driving the strategy; putting in place research based upon reviews with clients and rolling out best practices across the firm.

Over the past two years, the firm has carried out more client research than it ever has before. “It has been absolutely invaluable to us,” says Murphy. “We get such a depth of information out of these reviews: how clients’ businesses function; what they like or dislike about our service delivery; and, what they want us to do more or less of. You just don’t get that in an ongoing, day-to-day conversation about the current matter.”

And marketing’s involvement does not end there. Rather than simply drip-feeding the research back to lawyers and partners, Murphy and her team use the results to formulate a specific action plan relevant to that individual client or business and then they make every effort to ensure that the plan is followed up on.

For Murphy, effective, focused and long-term client-relationship management is a combination of good cultural practices and effective technology to support them. In fact, one of the achievements that she is most proud of since joining Mills & Reeve is the implementation of its CRM software system.

“The project required a significant investment from the firm, as the CRM package had to knit together with our existing practice-management and desktop system, which would have a huge impact on the way the firm worked,” she says.

Effectively, this meant that everybody had to sign up to a different way of doing things. Some of these changes where quite substantial, so Murphy’s department had to put together a compelling case to illustrate why these changes were so important, especially as database management was not regarded as an important aspect of the lawyer’s day.

“We had to illustrate simple things, such as the benefits that could be gained from the quality of the data,” says Murphy. “We had to really convince the firm that when you got the data right, you could then use it more effectively for client care and business-development purposes.”

Like many other marketers, Murphy has experienced resistance to some of the change initiatives that she has driven within the firm. However, this is something that is gradually becoming slightly easier as the legal-marketing industry continues to mature.

She has noticed that as lawyers become more knowledgeable of what effective marketing can achieve, they are more prepared to embrace new ways of thinking. “Also, if my team and I build up a successful track record with what we’re doing, people will start to think ‘Maybe we should just let them get on with it,’” she says.

Over the next few months, Murphy will continue to plough most of her department’s efforts into improving how they market to current clients. This ongoing focus, she says, will have a huge impact on the way the firm develops in the long term. “We just know that if we put the majority of our time and investment into that area, it will pay off,” she says.

Internal communication is imperative to ensure the marketing department achieves its goals with the full support of lawyers and senior management at the firm. For that reason, Murphy takes time to regularly talk to fee-earners, so that she can find out about any concerns they may have and then take measures to address them. She encourages her team to do the same and is proud this regular interaction takes place, even though it necessitates more legwork than sending out e-mails or memos.

“It’s great to have people on the ground who can have these chats, stay in touch with fee-earners and be central, rather than remote, to the business,” she says.Murphy attributes the success of her programmes at Mills & Reeve to successful teamworking, and the calibre of the people that she works with. “You are only as good as the people behind you,” she says. So, she has invested time in building on her existing team, recruiting individuals with good, solid experience from a wide range of industry sectors.

To maintain momentum, she has also concentratedon developing the team’s business skills. For the past two years, she has been making sure that everyone has soft management skills and technical skills to deliver. “You can’t expect partners to take advice from inexperienced people who can’t back up their ideas,” she says.

Murphy is still in the early days of her legal marketing career in comparison with veterans like Gillian Khan. But she has benefited from an increasingly sophisticated attitude to marketing among law firms and lawyers, and looks likely to further impress her team and firm with her outside experience and client perspective.