Profile: Jay Dinwoodie

Jay Dinwoodie's approach to global marketing is underpinned by a focused communications strategy aimed at recruiting everyone at international firm Dewey Ballantine as global brand ambassadors. It is a strategy driven by his own energy and enthusiasm, as Joanna Goodman reports.

In fewer than 18 months, Dewey Ballantine’s dynamic director of marketing and communications Jay Dinwoodie has transformed its international marketing department, helping the firm gain high-profile new business as well as winning the 2006 Legal Marketing award as international marketing director of the year.

Dinwoodie’s background is ideally suited to his role. He is a rare hybrid – a marketer in lawyer’s clothing. A law-school graduate who began his career developing and marketing e-billing products and services for corporate-law departments at Examen Inc., a legal software firm, he has been familiar with legal customer-relationship management (CRM) tools and resources since their inception, and knows how to apply them effectively. Ten years ago, he moved into legal marketing and communications and in November 2004, he joined Dewey Ballantine from international firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, where he was director of communications, managing the firm’s media relations in the US, Europe and Asia.

Dinwoodie has spent his entire career working with lawyers and developing positive, productive working relationships with the profession’s top decision makers. As Dewey Ballantine’s first marketing director in almost a decade, he works closely with its executive committee, helping the firm develop a global footprint that matches its strategic vision and supports its continued growth.

The fact that he has a law degree certainly helps. “It’s important, but it’s not essential,” says Dinwoodie. “The legal market has changed and lawyers these days have a better sense of what marketing is about.” His legal background means that he speaks their language and understands their culture. “Lawyers are busy people who charge by the hour, so anything you can do to reduce the time it takes them to explain what they’re trying to accomplish is appreciated,” he says.

By his own admission, when Dinwoodie first joined Dewey Ballantine he faced quite a challenge. “When I arrived, the marketing department wasn’t where it needed to be to support an international firm with 12 offices and 550 lawyers,” he explains. “I started by creating an organisational model that was scalable and better reflected the realities of the market and the needs of the lawyers.” He expanded the firm’s marketing and communications resources by taking on additional staff – the department has grown from a small group of seven dedicated, but overworked, individuals into a well-organised international force of 18 marketers – and restructured the marketing department into four divisions: marketing operations and business development, marketing and communications in Europe and two practice-group teams. The head of each division reports to Dinwoodie, as global marketing director. “Instead of everybody trying to do everything, there are now clearly defined responsibilities,” he says.

Dinwoodie’s practice-group model draws on his previous experience to produce significant efficiency gains for both lawyers and marketers. Each practice group has the support of a dedicated marketing team headed by a manager, who can call on the resources of the entire department. “If the head of the litigation department wants to launch a client event, he contacts the litigation marketing manager who carries out a needs assessment to figure out exactly what the partner wants to accomplish,” says Dinwoodie. “The marketing manager then sub-contracts the work, which might include conducting market research or creating invitations, to the relevant members of the operational group.” Thus, Dinwoodie has established clear lines of communication within his own department and between marketers and lawyers, who know who to contact when they require marketing expertise.

Internal communications is a key driver behind Dinwoodie’s marketing strategy. He explains the logic behind this approach. “If we aren’t keeping our own people informed about what is going on in the firm, how can we possibly expect them to act as brand ambassadors in the marketplace?” To this end, Dinwoodie has launched a series of internal communications initiatives. In addition to the firm’s quarterly periodical, there is now an electronic ‘Newsflash’ which is e-mailed to everyone in the firm. Newsflash communicates events as they happen, covering items such as a major deal being closed, a partner winning a prestigious award or the firm’s involvement in a community-service initiative.

Other news updates are targeted by audience. In consultation with the partners, Dinwoodie and his team have developed separate electronic newsletters for the litigation and corporate practice groups, known as ‘Roundups’. “We’re careful to tailor the medium to the message and the audience,” says Dinwoodie. For example, another newsletter promoting Dewey Ballantine’s commitment to pro bono and diversity activities is produced on paper. In this way, Dinwoodie’s strategy works from the inside out, linking internal and external audiences and reinforcing key messages.

One of Dinwoodie’s biggest challenges – and something he sees as a critical success factor underpinning his international marketing strategy – is delivering a consistent global brand. He describes potential pitfalls due to mismatches in custom and nuance as ‘tomahtos’, referring to the lyrics, “You like tomato and I like tomahto” from Gershwin’s song, ‘Let’s call the whole thing off’. Dinwoodie believes that attention to detail is key to building a successful global brand – something he has learnt through previous oversights. “When we introduced a technology tool to streamline our proposal process, we didn’t initially consider whether the outputs could format in A4,” he says. “Now I try to attune everyone on the team to recognising and avoiding those tomahtos!”

However, Dinwoodie sees an organisation’s brand as much more than its visual identity. “That’s simply an interesting graphic-design exercise,” he says. “Your brand is the promise that you make – an association with service excellence that your clients come to expect when they hear your firm’s name. I want Dewey Ballantine to be recognised as the greatest global mergers and acquisitions, finance and litigation firm for the financial-services industry. That’s more of a value proposition than simply putting an image such as a lighthouse on our website.”

For that reason, Dinwoodie sets out to recruit everyone in the firm as brand ambassadors – people who really understand the firm’s mission and connect with its core objectives. He illustrates his point with a story from Jack Welch’s book, ‘Winning’, in which a hospital janitor was asked what he did and instead of describing his own function, he replied, ‘We save lives.’

“That’s why we spend so much time and energy on internal communications,” explains Dinwoodie. “When people inside the firm really know what you do well and can tell people outside the organisation, their enthusiasm and commitment is contagious.”

Is this the secret of his award-winning approach to legal marketing? Dinwoodie acknowledges that his success is due in part to building and continually reinforcing positive and trusting working relationships throughout Dewey Ballantine. “My attitude is consultative yet deferential,” he says. “A law firm is a collection of great individual lawyers who choose to associate with each other. As marketers, we have to make sure that every single one of them understands the value that we add and we reflect that in our interactions with them. When offering lawyers marketing expertise, we behave like trained salespeople. We start by conducting a needs assessment and then we present alternative solutions that both deliver the individual partner’s objectives and fit into what the firm hopes to accomplish in the aggregate. As a team, it has helped us build up enough personal credibility inside the firm to allow us to push the envelope a little bit more each day and continue to challenge ourselves.”

Another important challenge for legal marketers is to ensure that the firm is responsive to changes in the marketplace. Dinwoodie explains that the trend towards convergence in the global financial-services industry means that firms need to differentiate themselves either by sheer size or by outstanding expertise in a particular field. This influences the range of services that they need to offer and the location of their offices.

In addition to the launch of the practice-group marketing model and client-relationship programme, Dinwoodie is delighted that his overhaul of the firm’s proposal process contributed to a recent panel win, where Dewey Ballantine was selected as one of the final 20 despite not having been on the original 50-strong panel.

Above all, however, Dinwoodie is proud of his team and keen to acknowledge their contribution to his success. “Without them, I don’t think I would have been considered for the Legal Marketing award,” he says. “Keeping them energised and motivated is very important to me and they deserve some recognition. So this profile wouldn’t be complete without me saying that I have the greatest marketing team in the world.”

A winning approach to international legal marketing based on developing good working relationships at every level, and powerful internal communications, has helped raise the profile of both Dewey Ballantine and Dinwoodie himself, whose success has achieved recognition both inside the firm and throughout the legal marketing profession.