As new forms of communication mean less personal interctions with clients, law firm branding is increasingly filling the marketing gap
Lawyers discussing business development seem deeply fond of the near-maxim that “it's all about personal relationships.” Why is it, then, that “branding” is becoming so ubiquitous these days in the lexicon of law firm business development?
The thinking used to be that beyond name recognition – logos and the like – branding played only a limited purpose for law firms that sold services based for the most part on the individual expertise of their lawyers or their practice groups. But as personal contact declines in a globalized, connected and online world, the elements that create and maintain relationships, personal or otherwise, have changed. As face time decreases and alternate modes of projection and communication emerge, of necessity a void is created. Branding is what fills that gap. It does so by establishing a framework within which today's varied and frequently remote business connections – relationships if you will – can emerge and fortify.
“A brand communicates a comfort level on which a client or prospective client can depend and sets the stage for a relationship,” says Susan Van Dyke, a Vancouver-based legal consultant. “Even a client who is hiring an individual lawyer is likely also responding to the brand.”
Branding and marketing, however, are not the same things. “Marketing is the way we project who we are,” says Lise Monette, the Toronto-based Global Head of Client Programs and Chief Marketing Officer – Canada at Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP. “Our brand is who we are.”
Although the arrival of the Information Age has of course changed marketing techniques, what's changed even more is exactly what it is that law firms are marketing. As it turns out, they are marketing a modern and expanded notion of “the brand,” the collection of attributes to which law firms hope clients seeking legal services will relate. “A brand is a promise of a consistent type of service and of a consistent way in which that service will be delivered,” Van Dyke says. “And that includes elements as diverse as the speed of turnaround time, locations and language capabilities.”
Law firms' brands must differentiate them from their competitors. As well, their brands – like all good brands – must be built on elements that are authentic and relevant. Relevance, however, is not a static commodity in the furiously competitive legal market. “It's a very dynamic time in the legal community, and your plans have to be flexible because clients continue to change faster than their lawyers,” says Laurie Robertson, the London, UK-based Global Director of Business Development, Marketing and Communications at the global firm Baker & McKenzie LLP, which topped the rankings in the Sharplegal 2013 Global Elite Brand Index.
Consider, for example, the rather sudden ubiquity of what has become known as the value proposition. “As large legal departments become increasingly prominent in companies' operations, people are talking about value more than ever, and that in turn brings budget pressures that affect the choice of external firms,” says Elizabeth Duffy, the New York-based vice president, US, of Acritas, a global legal market research specialist firm.
This said, marketing has many tools at its disposal, and with the advent of social media, many more tools and certainly more outlets than it enjoyed previously. But in the days before lawyers acknowledged that these tools were within their sphere of operation (it wasn't all that long ago that professional regulators prohibited advertising or “touting”), personal relationships were indeed the core of business development efforts, with perhaps a nod to the graphic design of the firm's stationery. In this scenario, law firms had a great deal of control of how personal relationships with clients were developed and how they were maintained.
Issues of control aside, what is true is that all law firms have a brand, whether they've given any thought or devoted any resources to it or not. Those firms that haven't given any thought to it will find that their brand is fashioned by their clients and other stakeholders in the profession. In that sense, the firm's brand is established by the opinions that others have formulated about it and the way it does business. The danger here is that what others think of the firm may not be the way that lawyers want them to think of their partnership.
That applies even more in a world where everything is out there, intentionally or not, for public consumption. Nowadays, brand perceptions are subject to a much greater spectrum of influence than they used to be. In this environment, it borders on foolhardy for a law firm to ignore its brand and becomes almost mandatory to do everything it can to shape it. “Brand has always been the battleground for differentiating law firms and you can never be casual about it or take it for granted,” says Judy Stein-Korte of Toronto, who is Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP's senior media and public relations officer. “And in this socially connected media world, brand reputation can be lost in seconds, or the amount of time needed to launch a YouTube video.”
The first step, then, is to create a brand. “Law firms have to ask themselves what the common thread is that makes the firm attractive and appealing to clients,” Duffy says. “When a firm can uncover that thread, it becomes the intangible, contagious, authentic quality driving the passion that brings everyone together.”
Amongst the range of typically opinionated individuals who form law firm partnerships, it can be difficult to coalesce a single vision. “Where we see the most progress being made in branding is in firms with a corporate structure where leaders are prepared to deal with risk and reward by formulating a strong vision and strategy and bring everyone into that,” Duffy says. “Firms like that can take better advantage of opportunities than firms where there is more debate.”
Perhaps so. But it's also instructive to examine the experience of global law firm Dentons, which recently entered the Canadian market in a merger that brought together the UK's SNR Denton, France's Salans and Canada's Fraser Milner Casgrain. “Our brand concept came from a team that interviewed over 200 partners and dozens of clients,” says Elliott Portnoy, Dentons' UK-based Global Chief Executive Officer. “This was not a case of a brand being handed down from on high, but a careful collaborative effort that involved our 3,000 family members around the globe.”
After the branding strategy was conceived, Dentons went to great lengths to explain it to everyone in the firm. “Our leadership walked everyone, from the receptionist to the lawyers, around our thinking and goals,” says Chris Pinnington, Dentons' Toronto-based Canada CEO.
The brand that emerged was what Joe Andrew, Dentons UK-based Global Chair, calls a “client-centric challenger brand.” It is designed to send the message that Dentons is a firm created to better serve clients, one tailored to local groups and practices but with a global reach. “We talk about being a polycentric law firm,” Andrew says. “Unlike the US and UK law firms, who set out to colonize the world, we have no one centre of governance, culture or way of practising law.”
Because different practice groups in different locations have different competitors operating in varying market conditions, Dentons designed its brand so as to allow the firm to distinguish itself in very targeted ways. “What we're most proud of is that we migrated our brands by formulating individually tailored plans for local groups,” Andrew says. “The message was that we wanted people to hire us because of our substantive expertise, our knowledge of particular industries or businesses, and our familiarity with the business culture in any given location.”
The result, Pinnington explains, is a brand that recognizes clients' need for both sectoral expertise and geographic reach. “It's not just a recasting of legacy FMC or just a national message taken global,” he says. “And we're seeing the results of our branding in the extent to which Canadian businesses that are globalizing are seeking us out for support and assistance offshore.”
From all appearances, the branding exercise has been a resounding success. Statistics, for example, fully support Pinnington's observations. This year, Dentons moved up 42 spots to 19th on Acritas's Sharplegal 2013 Global Elite Brand Index, putting the firm on a top 20 list whose core names have barely changed in more than a decade. Quite an achievement considering that it was only in April 2013 that Dentons officially emerged in its present form.
“Jumping ahead 42 places in 2013 [Acritas aggregated the scores for the legacy brands to account for the effect of brand combination], the newest brand on the block, Dentons, has performed exceptionally well … fuelled largely by a substantial increase in brand awareness on the back of high-profile deals,” the survey's authors state in their report. “For newer brands trying to win mindshare from incumbent firms, the basis of Dentons' growth is an important example. High levels of awareness are a crucial first step to winning business and growing a firm's client base, particularly when the firm is rapidly increasing its footprint and capability.”
Undoubtedly, creating that awareness through marketing is as important as the shape that the brand takes. But what kind of marketing? “The most effective way to market a brand is through a current client contact or a former client relationship,” Duffy says. “But that is the place where a lot of law firms fall down, by failing to do enough toward reinforcing top-of-mind awareness on a regular basis.”
One of the keys to effective branding, then, is simply staying in touch. “We're not just talking about staying in touch with the client, but about following up on referrals and building broader networks through the contacts you already have,” Duffy explains.
Unfortunately, law firms tend to concentrate on well-established clients to the detriment of staying in touch with others. “What we've discovered, both in our global and Canadian surveys, is that law firms are leaving a huge number of potential contacts untapped by failing to communicate their brand message widely enough,” Duffy says.
Staying in touch, however, loses much of its impact if the message from individual lawyers and teams isn't consistent. But the hard truth is that many law firms aren't spending enough time educating their lawyers in what their colleagues around the globe are doing.
“What clients want to know most is who the law firm's other clients have been, what experience a law firm has with the legal work required, and what experience it has in the jurisdiction where the services will be rendered,” says Richard Stock of Catalyst Consulting, an international legal consulting firm based in Canada. “Too many lawyers and law firms let bilateral or individual relationships stand in the way of knowing what the firm stands for as a whole, and what it can do.”
Dentons' Andrew is of similar mind. “The best way to build a brand is to make sure that everyone knows how to talk about the firm,” he says.
But consistency should not equate to rigidity. “The best law firms have a diverse group of personalities all working under the same umbrella,” Duffy says.
Indeed, a strong brand culture should supplement, rather than usurp, the benefits of individuality at the firm. “The mantra for years has been that clients go to firms that have the lawyer they want,” says John Coleman, the Montreal-based Managing Partner of Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP. “But while individuals' reputations are still very important, even the best lawyer in the field may not get the case if his or her firm doesn't have the requisite brand recognition. Clients are looking for both, in a seamless experience.”
But marketing the brand involves a great deal more than personal contact. “While most of the brand reputation is created through the experiences clients have of working with a lawyer and a firm, standard communication techniques like seminars and press stories about the law firm are also very significant,” Robertson says.
Consistency, however, remains the order of the day. “You must be consistent throughout to market your brand properly,” Robertson says. “And that includes consistency in the law firm's approach to where it opens offices, how its lawyers talk to the press, what they say when they are interviewed, what its internal culture looks like, how the firm manages its website, and how its teams present when they pitch to clients.”
By way of example, large firms with strong international banking practices look to the presence of significant financial institutions to influence their office opening practices. “The UK's Magic Circle firms are much more interested in Hong Kong and Shanghai than they are in Manila,” Robertson says. “That might not be the case for a firm with a different brand, a different message, and a different client base.”
Firms are becoming increasingly sophisticated about using social media on its own, or using it to spread content from other media. “It's still early days, so while the legal market is talking about social media and devoting some resources to it, it remains a small part of the total marketing package,” Robertson says.
Part of the restraint, of course, is the risk inherent in the social media process. “Law firms are worried about their reputations in a media setting where you can't retract anything,” Monette says.
In the social media setting, then, a consistent message attains special significance. “One of the most interesting things I've been doing is inculcating social media best practices into the firm,” Stein-Korte says.
Perhaps that's why social media for lawyers to date has been less about engagement than about disseminating the brand. “It's not about everybody tweeting, but about putting important information in places where people we are interested in are looking,” Stein-Korte says. “On the other hand, in my opinion, anyone who still believes that social media is just a passing fad is out of sync.”
Dentons, for example, targeted online advertising to promote its post-merger brand. “We believe that's a more sophisticated way to brand and that we get more bang for our buck, largely because online sites have better statistics about where we can find the clients we need to reach,” Andrew says.
That is not to say that traditional methods of marketing don't have their place. For its part, Norton Rose – albeit quite unusually for a law firm – engaged in billboard advertising in airports and other places to create awareness. “Norton Rose expanded quite rapidly through mergers and then set out to put their name onto the local brand,” Robertson says. “The billboard advertising was meant to build a very basic brand awareness because the firm knew that the Norton Rose name meant nothing in Canada and Australia.”
It does now. Acritas' Canadian Law Firm Brand Index 2013 named Norton Rose as the Canadian brand most favoured by influential companies from Canada and around the world. “In the Canadian market, this translated not only into higher levels of brand awareness and favourability but also improved brand consideration for premium work and overall usage — proving the power of brand as a vehicle for business development,” note the authors of Sharplegal 2013 Global Elite Brand Index.
Norton Rose also ranked seventh in the Sharplegal 2013 Global Elite Brand Index, up two spots from its ninth position in 2012. And while advancing just two spots from ninth to seventh may appear modest to some, it must be seen in terms of a brand that was already high on the list and has had a steady pattern of moving up the ladder. Indeed, both Norton Rose and Dentons were among five firms included on the global survey's “ones-to-watch” list of “top 20 brands that have consistently gained strength over four years.”
But however a firm chooses to market its brand, the effort isn't of much use if the client has no interest in what the firm is talking about. And these days, a firm that knows what it's talking about has been asking the clients what matters to them — yet another way in which a personal approach permeates the branding.
“The research isn't just about substantive matters,” Duffy says. “It can be as simple as asking clients if they respond better to email or phone calls, or to seminars as opposed to updates. If you want to know what will work best in communicating the brand, just ask the clients.”
The firms that are doing this systematically are the ones making the greatest strides with their brands. “Our surveys show that the gap in the brand landscape is widening between firms who are serious about client feedback and those who are not,” Duffy says.
Still, only a small portion of law firms are going further than their top 10 clients to obtain feedback in a systematic and broad manner. “We recommend a survey of the Top 200 clients annually, followed by building the feedback into the service levels, and then capturing the results with follow-up feedback after matters have concluded,” Duffy says.
For its part, Osler has been doing national client satisfaction surveys for more than a decade. “We continue to seek feedback in various forms because you can't promote your brand in a vacuum,” Stein-Korte says. “Because every client is different, you need very specific information.”
Indeed, Norton Rose credits its extensive and systematic research and feedback program with the growing success of its international branding strategy. At the same time, there is a growing realization that the product needs to be humanized.
“Like many other firms, we're trying to figure out how to engage users of legal services by creating communities instead of just pushing the information out there,” Monette says. “We're also trying to humanize the product because clients today are interested not only in the facts but in getting a gut sense of a lawyer's skills in and approach to giving business advice.”
Somehow, then, it all trends back to the personal, the engagement of the individual in the common message. “First and foremost, branding is an experience that's a living, breathing entity, and not just a logo or tactical and traditional marketing,” Monette says.
But then, it has to be. Clients are people too. “In the end, a brand is a multi-layered promise trying to evoke an emotion,” Van Dyke says.
Julius Melnitzer is a freelance legal-affairs writer in Toronto.
Lawyers discussing business development seem deeply fond of the near-maxim that “it's all about personal relationships.” Why is it, then, that “branding” is becoming so ubiquitous these days in the lexicon of law firm business development?
The thinking used to be that beyond name recognition – logos and the like – branding played only a limited purpose for law firms that sold services based for the most part on the individual expertise of their lawyers or their practice groups. But as personal contact declines in a globalized, connected and online world, the elements that create and maintain relationships, personal or otherwise, have changed. As face time decreases and alternate modes of projection and communication emerge, of necessity a void is created. Branding is what fills that gap. It does so by establishing a framework within which today's varied and frequently remote business connections – relationships if you will – can emerge and fortify.
“A brand communicates a comfort level on which a client or prospective client can depend and sets the stage for a relationship,” says Susan Van Dyke, a Vancouver-based legal consultant. “Even a client who is hiring an individual lawyer is likely also responding to the brand.”
Branding and marketing, however, are not the same things. “Marketing is the way we project who we are,” says Lise Monette, the Toronto-based Global Head of Client Programs and Chief Marketing Officer – Canada at Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP. “Our brand is who we are.”
Although the arrival of the Information Age has of course changed marketing techniques, what's changed even more is exactly what it is that law firms are marketing. As it turns out, they are marketing a modern and expanded notion of “the brand,” the collection of attributes to which law firms hope clients seeking legal services will relate. “A brand is a promise of a consistent type of service and of a consistent way in which that service will be delivered,” Van Dyke says. “And that includes elements as diverse as the speed of turnaround time, locations and language capabilities.”
Law firms' brands must differentiate them from their competitors. As well, their brands – like all good brands – must be built on elements that are authentic and relevant. Relevance, however, is not a static commodity in the furiously competitive legal market. “It's a very dynamic time in the legal community, and your plans have to be flexible because clients continue to change faster than their lawyers,” says Laurie Robertson, the London, UK-based Global Director of Business Development, Marketing and Communications at the global firm Baker & McKenzie LLP, which topped the rankings in the Sharplegal 2013 Global Elite Brand Index.
Consider, for example, the rather sudden ubiquity of what has become known as the value proposition. “As large legal departments become increasingly prominent in companies' operations, people are talking about value more than ever, and that in turn brings budget pressures that affect the choice of external firms,” says Elizabeth Duffy, the New York-based vice president, US, of Acritas, a global legal market research specialist firm.
This said, marketing has many tools at its disposal, and with the advent of social media, many more tools and certainly more outlets than it enjoyed previously. But in the days before lawyers acknowledged that these tools were within their sphere of operation (it wasn't all that long ago that professional regulators prohibited advertising or “touting”), personal relationships were indeed the core of business development efforts, with perhaps a nod to the graphic design of the firm's stationery. In this scenario, law firms had a great deal of control of how personal relationships with clients were developed and how they were maintained.
Issues of control aside, what is true is that all law firms have a brand, whether they've given any thought or devoted any resources to it or not. Those firms that haven't given any thought to it will find that their brand is fashioned by their clients and other stakeholders in the profession. In that sense, the firm's brand is established by the opinions that others have formulated about it and the way it does business. The danger here is that what others think of the firm may not be the way that lawyers want them to think of their partnership.
That applies even more in a world where everything is out there, intentionally or not, for public consumption. Nowadays, brand perceptions are subject to a much greater spectrum of influence than they used to be. In this environment, it borders on foolhardy for a law firm to ignore its brand and becomes almost mandatory to do everything it can to shape it. “Brand has always been the battleground for differentiating law firms and you can never be casual about it or take it for granted,” says Judy Stein-Korte of Toronto, who is Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP's senior media and public relations officer. “And in this socially connected media world, brand reputation can be lost in seconds, or the amount of time needed to launch a YouTube video.”
The first step, then, is to create a brand. “Law firms have to ask themselves what the common thread is that makes the firm attractive and appealing to clients,” Duffy says. “When a firm can uncover that thread, it becomes the intangible, contagious, authentic quality driving the passion that brings everyone together.”
Amongst the range of typically opinionated individuals who form law firm partnerships, it can be difficult to coalesce a single vision. “Where we see the most progress being made in branding is in firms with a corporate structure where leaders are prepared to deal with risk and reward by formulating a strong vision and strategy and bring everyone into that,” Duffy says. “Firms like that can take better advantage of opportunities than firms where there is more debate.”
Perhaps so. But it's also instructive to examine the experience of global law firm Dentons, which recently entered the Canadian market in a merger that brought together the UK's SNR Denton, France's Salans and Canada's Fraser Milner Casgrain. “Our brand concept came from a team that interviewed over 200 partners and dozens of clients,” says Elliott Portnoy, Dentons' UK-based Global Chief Executive Officer. “This was not a case of a brand being handed down from on high, but a careful collaborative effort that involved our 3,000 family members around the globe.”
After the branding strategy was conceived, Dentons went to great lengths to explain it to everyone in the firm. “Our leadership walked everyone, from the receptionist to the lawyers, around our thinking and goals,” says Chris Pinnington, Dentons' Toronto-based Canada CEO.
The brand that emerged was what Joe Andrew, Dentons UK-based Global Chair, calls a “client-centric challenger brand.” It is designed to send the message that Dentons is a firm created to better serve clients, one tailored to local groups and practices but with a global reach. “We talk about being a polycentric law firm,” Andrew says. “Unlike the US and UK law firms, who set out to colonize the world, we have no one centre of governance, culture or way of practising law.”
Because different practice groups in different locations have different competitors operating in varying market conditions, Dentons designed its brand so as to allow the firm to distinguish itself in very targeted ways. “What we're most proud of is that we migrated our brands by formulating individually tailored plans for local groups,” Andrew says. “The message was that we wanted people to hire us because of our substantive expertise, our knowledge of particular industries or businesses, and our familiarity with the business culture in any given location.”
The result, Pinnington explains, is a brand that recognizes clients' need for both sectoral expertise and geographic reach. “It's not just a recasting of legacy FMC or just a national message taken global,” he says. “And we're seeing the results of our branding in the extent to which Canadian businesses that are globalizing are seeking us out for support and assistance offshore.”
From all appearances, the branding exercise has been a resounding success. Statistics, for example, fully support Pinnington's observations. This year, Dentons moved up 42 spots to 19th on Acritas's Sharplegal 2013 Global Elite Brand Index, putting the firm on a top 20 list whose core names have barely changed in more than a decade. Quite an achievement considering that it was only in April 2013 that Dentons officially emerged in its present form.
“Jumping ahead 42 places in 2013 [Acritas aggregated the scores for the legacy brands to account for the effect of brand combination], the newest brand on the block, Dentons, has performed exceptionally well … fuelled largely by a substantial increase in brand awareness on the back of high-profile deals,” the survey's authors state in their report. “For newer brands trying to win mindshare from incumbent firms, the basis of Dentons' growth is an important example. High levels of awareness are a crucial first step to winning business and growing a firm's client base, particularly when the firm is rapidly increasing its footprint and capability.”
Undoubtedly, creating that awareness through marketing is as important as the shape that the brand takes. But what kind of marketing? “The most effective way to market a brand is through a current client contact or a former client relationship,” Duffy says. “But that is the place where a lot of law firms fall down, by failing to do enough toward reinforcing top-of-mind awareness on a regular basis.”
One of the keys to effective branding, then, is simply staying in touch. “We're not just talking about staying in touch with the client, but about following up on referrals and building broader networks through the contacts you already have,” Duffy explains.
Unfortunately, law firms tend to concentrate on well-established clients to the detriment of staying in touch with others. “What we've discovered, both in our global and Canadian surveys, is that law firms are leaving a huge number of potential contacts untapped by failing to communicate their brand message widely enough,” Duffy says.
Staying in touch, however, loses much of its impact if the message from individual lawyers and teams isn't consistent. But the hard truth is that many law firms aren't spending enough time educating their lawyers in what their colleagues around the globe are doing.
“What clients want to know most is who the law firm's other clients have been, what experience a law firm has with the legal work required, and what experience it has in the jurisdiction where the services will be rendered,” says Richard Stock of Catalyst Consulting, an international legal consulting firm based in Canada. “Too many lawyers and law firms let bilateral or individual relationships stand in the way of knowing what the firm stands for as a whole, and what it can do.”
Dentons' Andrew is of similar mind. “The best way to build a brand is to make sure that everyone knows how to talk about the firm,” he says.
But consistency should not equate to rigidity. “The best law firms have a diverse group of personalities all working under the same umbrella,” Duffy says.
Indeed, a strong brand culture should supplement, rather than usurp, the benefits of individuality at the firm. “The mantra for years has been that clients go to firms that have the lawyer they want,” says John Coleman, the Montreal-based Managing Partner of Norton Rose Fulbright Canada LLP. “But while individuals' reputations are still very important, even the best lawyer in the field may not get the case if his or her firm doesn't have the requisite brand recognition. Clients are looking for both, in a seamless experience.”
But marketing the brand involves a great deal more than personal contact. “While most of the brand reputation is created through the experiences clients have of working with a lawyer and a firm, standard communication techniques like seminars and press stories about the law firm are also very significant,” Robertson says.
Consistency, however, remains the order of the day. “You must be consistent throughout to market your brand properly,” Robertson says. “And that includes consistency in the law firm's approach to where it opens offices, how its lawyers talk to the press, what they say when they are interviewed, what its internal culture looks like, how the firm manages its website, and how its teams present when they pitch to clients.”
By way of example, large firms with strong international banking practices look to the presence of significant financial institutions to influence their office opening practices. “The UK's Magic Circle firms are much more interested in Hong Kong and Shanghai than they are in Manila,” Robertson says. “That might not be the case for a firm with a different brand, a different message, and a different client base.”
Firms are becoming increasingly sophisticated about using social media on its own, or using it to spread content from other media. “It's still early days, so while the legal market is talking about social media and devoting some resources to it, it remains a small part of the total marketing package,” Robertson says.
Part of the restraint, of course, is the risk inherent in the social media process. “Law firms are worried about their reputations in a media setting where you can't retract anything,” Monette says.
In the social media setting, then, a consistent message attains special significance. “One of the most interesting things I've been doing is inculcating social media best practices into the firm,” Stein-Korte says.
Perhaps that's why social media for lawyers to date has been less about engagement than about disseminating the brand. “It's not about everybody tweeting, but about putting important information in places where people we are interested in are looking,” Stein-Korte says. “On the other hand, in my opinion, anyone who still believes that social media is just a passing fad is out of sync.”
Dentons, for example, targeted online advertising to promote its post-merger brand. “We believe that's a more sophisticated way to brand and that we get more bang for our buck, largely because online sites have better statistics about where we can find the clients we need to reach,” Andrew says.
That is not to say that traditional methods of marketing don't have their place. For its part, Norton Rose – albeit quite unusually for a law firm – engaged in billboard advertising in airports and other places to create awareness. “Norton Rose expanded quite rapidly through mergers and then set out to put their name onto the local brand,” Robertson says. “The billboard advertising was meant to build a very basic brand awareness because the firm knew that the Norton Rose name meant nothing in Canada and Australia.”
It does now. Acritas' Canadian Law Firm Brand Index 2013 named Norton Rose as the Canadian brand most favoured by influential companies from Canada and around the world. “In the Canadian market, this translated not only into higher levels of brand awareness and favourability but also improved brand consideration for premium work and overall usage — proving the power of brand as a vehicle for business development,” note the authors of Sharplegal 2013 Global Elite Brand Index.
Norton Rose also ranked seventh in the Sharplegal 2013 Global Elite Brand Index, up two spots from its ninth position in 2012. And while advancing just two spots from ninth to seventh may appear modest to some, it must be seen in terms of a brand that was already high on the list and has had a steady pattern of moving up the ladder. Indeed, both Norton Rose and Dentons were among five firms included on the global survey's “ones-to-watch” list of “top 20 brands that have consistently gained strength over four years.”
But however a firm chooses to market its brand, the effort isn't of much use if the client has no interest in what the firm is talking about. And these days, a firm that knows what it's talking about has been asking the clients what matters to them — yet another way in which a personal approach permeates the branding.
“The research isn't just about substantive matters,” Duffy says. “It can be as simple as asking clients if they respond better to email or phone calls, or to seminars as opposed to updates. If you want to know what will work best in communicating the brand, just ask the clients.”
The firms that are doing this systematically are the ones making the greatest strides with their brands. “Our surveys show that the gap in the brand landscape is widening between firms who are serious about client feedback and those who are not,” Duffy says.
Still, only a small portion of law firms are going further than their top 10 clients to obtain feedback in a systematic and broad manner. “We recommend a survey of the Top 200 clients annually, followed by building the feedback into the service levels, and then capturing the results with follow-up feedback after matters have concluded,” Duffy says.
For its part, Osler has been doing national client satisfaction surveys for more than a decade. “We continue to seek feedback in various forms because you can't promote your brand in a vacuum,” Stein-Korte says. “Because every client is different, you need very specific information.”
Indeed, Norton Rose credits its extensive and systematic research and feedback program with the growing success of its international branding strategy. At the same time, there is a growing realization that the product needs to be humanized.
“Like many other firms, we're trying to figure out how to engage users of legal services by creating communities instead of just pushing the information out there,” Monette says. “We're also trying to humanize the product because clients today are interested not only in the facts but in getting a gut sense of a lawyer's skills in and approach to giving business advice.”
Somehow, then, it all trends back to the personal, the engagement of the individual in the common message. “First and foremost, branding is an experience that's a living, breathing entity, and not just a logo or tactical and traditional marketing,” Monette says.
But then, it has to be. Clients are people too. “In the end, a brand is a multi-layered promise trying to evoke an emotion,” Van Dyke says.
Julius Melnitzer is a freelance legal-affairs writer in Toronto.
Lawyer(s)
John A. Coleman