Following Through: marketing management for law firms

MARKETING MANAGEMENT

Following through

Firm-wide success in client development requires training, incentives, and someone to swing a hammer

Several years ago had a power breakfast with a partner from a prominent Phoenix law firm (he provided the power; I provided the breakfast), and in the course of our conversation he asked me about Hulcher & Hays' marketing services.

"We help law firms get and keep more clients," I replied, "but enough about us. Let’s talk about you. How big is your marketing budget?"

"Uh, I think we spent about $700,000 last year."

Oh, man, deep pockets, I said to myself. "How much of that was your marketing director’s salary?"

"Oh, the $700,000 doesn’t include salaries."

"Okay, fine. So, how much do you pay your marketing director?"

"Uh, about $85,000, I think."

Holy smoke, who’d they hire, Don King? "What does he do for his $85,000?"

"She."

"What does she do?"

"Well, she passes out a lot of memos and articles, and she spends a great deal of time working at her computer. Oh, and she sends out thank-you letters to referral sources."

All that for just 85K, eh? Hell, if you wanted your marketing person to do nothing, I know people who would be happy to do nothing for half that much. "Let me ask you this – and if it’s none of my business, say so: What did you get for your $785,000?"

"Well, we have a brochure, a website and a newsletter, and we purchase ads in the Business Gazette, the Business Journal, the Arizona Capitol Times and one or two others."

I didn’t ask what you spent it on, Ace; I asked what you got for your money. And would someone please tell me what good those newspaper ads do? "Did you pick up a lot of new clients last year that you could attribute to your marketing program?"

"Uh, well, I don’t really know. We don’t keep track of that."

Oh, man, a consultant’s dream: a firm that writes big checks and doesn’t care about results. "Do all of your attorneys participate in marketing?"

"Well, they’re encouraged to, but I don’t know how much actually gets done. We’re pretty busy people, you know."

Right, being lawyers and all. "Doesn’t your marketing director or somebody go around and knock heads together if people don’t try to bring in business?"

"That would be disruptive. We believe the firm should provide the resources to help people market, but it’s ultimately up to each person to decide how engaged he or she is going to be. We try to allow our people a lot of autonomy and individuality in that respect."

Liberal. "Okay, but what about the associates?"

"I’m talking about our associates."

"Let me get this straight. You sink nearly $800,000 a year – twice as much as you probably should – into a marketing program, give your attorneys everything they need to build a good practice and attract top clients, and when push comes to shove, if all they want to do is sit on their big fat, uh, chairs and do nothing but practice law, that’s just swell. Am I right?"

"Well, I think you’re being just a bit judgmental. I should remind you that ours is a noble profession and ..."

At last! I finally understand why they call it "a noble profession." Only nobility is willing and able to throw hard-earned money around for no good reason, which, it seems, is exactly what this firm did with its spare $785,000 …

Marketing problems

This story isn’t entirely true, of course, but the problems described therein are real and are more the rule than the exception.

Despite the willingness of many firms to invest mightily in the trappings of marketing, when all is said and done, there’s usually been a lot said and not much done. The reason: No matter how much is spent on staff, consultants, research, strategy, brochures, advertising and social events, the payoff comes only if individual attorneys get actively and directly involved in developing clients and referral sources, one person at a time.

Ironically, when attorneys do get involved, firms find that they really don’t need much of that other stuff, thus bearing out Hulcher’s First Principle of Law Firm Marketing: The most effective marketing isn’t very expensive, and the most expensive marketing isn’t very effective.

Nevertheless, cowed by the likely resistance to hands-on techniques that actually work, firms tend to retreat behind costly alternatives that involve attorneys only cosmetically and allow them to remain insulated from the personal contact that drives client development. Consequently, major opportunities for firm growth go to waste:

A seminar draws 50 potential clients, but they remain potential because the presenting attorney can’t summon the courage to call them afterwards to thank them for coming and to ask if they have any unanswered questions.
A commercial client with a list of legal needs as long as your arm uses other firms for services that yours could provide because the billing attorney won’t try to cross-sell for his partner down the hall.
The CPA firm next door has clients you’d love to represent but don’t because you’ve never cultivated a referral relationship with any of their people.

Fortunately, no law firm’s marketing story has to be this grim. There really are firms that build productive client and referral relationships through direct personal contact, and their attorneys probably aren’t much different from yours.

What separates those firms from the field, more often than not, is a determination at the partnership level to confront the demons that beset less resolute marketers. They achieve success through steadfast attention to five key areas: individualized planning; training; incentives; accountability; and leadership.

Design marketing plans around your attorneys, not just your firm

Most firm-wide marketing plans are like War and Peace, only slightly shorter: A few people read it once, no one reads it twice, and it doesn’t inspire anyone to do anything. (By the way, I once took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in 92 minutes. It’s about Russia.)

Every attorney who’s supposed to attract or come in close contact with clients should have some semblance of an individual marketing plan. A tailored plan that includes specific goals, tactics and deadlines provides a yardstick against which attorneys can be measured, and with which attorneys can be thrashed if they don’t perform.

Attorneys’ individual marketing plans should:

be of their own making, or for the next year all you’ll hear out of them is, "Hey, I never agreed to do that";
be consistent with that attorney’s strengths, weaknesses, preferences, energy level, practice area, astrological sign, etc.;
touch on all aspects of client development that are appropriate to that attorney’s practice area (e.g., writing, public speaking, outside activities, entertaining, personal contact, etc.);
be as detailed as possible, breaking down overwhelming tasks (e.g., getting Motorola’s intellectual property work) into lots of easy tasks that can be done in small doses (e.g., looking up Motorola’s phone number);
assign specific action items to specific dates that the attorney’s secretary can add to the calendar; and
include a budget to support the plan.

Client development requires training

Most attorneys will rarely admit that they don’t know how to do something in the area of marketing; instead, they just won’t do it. And when they’re asked why, they’ll look real tense for a few seconds and then start jabbering about how that would violate some irrelevant or imagined ethical rule.

Fortunately, attorneys are smart and can be trained to do practically anything. (First, however, they may have to be deprogrammed – like runaway teenagers who’ve been rescued from the Moonies – to reverse the effects of the social leprosy they contracted between law school and now.)

Here’s a basic syllabus of training topics that may help give them the confidence they need to carry out their marking plans:

effective use of initial consultations
managing client expectations
receiving client feedback
cultivating referral sources
how to "work a room"
listening skills
cross-selling
handling difficult clients
networking techniques
"closing" techniques
fear management
time management
staff training and supervision

Make marketing worth their while

If you want your attorneys to market themselves, give them some incentive.

It can be negative incentive – "Get out there and bring in some new clients or be out of here by Friday" – or it can be positive, such as giving them a bonus for generating new business, or applying to their billable-hour quota a certain percentage of the approved time they devote to marketing.

That’s kind of the American way, right? Right, but I never cease to be amazed by firms that lavish all kinds of money on attorneys for doing legal work (for which they don’t need motivation) and stiff them when it comes to marketing (for which they need motivation in the worst way), and impose no consequences on those who do nothing.

Stress accountability

Up to now, we’ve concentrated on eliminating excuses for not marketing. We’ve provided plans that fit the attorneys. We’ve trained them. And we’ve compensated them. Now it’s time to nag them.

Activity summaries. Attorneys must be held accountable for their time and effort. They should be expected to maintain some type of monthly activity summary that illustrates what they did and didn’t do during the last thirty days. The summary elements might include the following: contacts with prospective clients; non-billable contacts with clients; cross-selling; contacts with known and potential referral sources; speeches; articles for publication; seminars; community involvement; trade association and bar activity; and marketing plan elements completed, in progress, and not yet started.

Marketing meetings. Attorneys should have monthly marketing meetings, as a firm or as a practice or industry group. The agenda for these meetings should include training, progress reports, and discussions of marketing opportunities.

Marketing teams. Create a "buddy" system matching two or three attorneys. They can act as consultants for each other, exploiting attorneys’ natural inclination to solve other people’s problems, even if they have neither the ability nor the inclination to solve their own.

Most important, someone has to wield the hammer

Every firm or practice group needs at least one partner (or member, director, shareholder, etc.) to play the "heavy" – somebody who, if you don’t keep up your activity summary or follow your marketing plan, will make you wish you’d gone to plumber school instead of law school.

You’d think most law firms would be fertile ground for such tough, overbearing, unforgiving brutes, especially in their litigation departments. Wrong.

Even a firm’s most demanding, sociopathic members may be reluctant to come down on their colleagues for non-marketing because, in most cases, they’re not bringing in any work either, and they don’t want to be called a hypocrite.

Well, if you believe nothing else in this article, believe this: The enforcer need not be like Caesar’s wife. He needs to be like an ex-wife. His mission is to hunt down and harass parasitic attorneys who are trying to ride someone else’s wagon instead of pulling their own.

No other component of client development is more important than the enforcer. Without one, law firms will continue to go through the motions of marketing, spending huge sums of money, and wondering why they don’t have more to show for it.