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Best Attorney marketing strategies: A method to find what works

Manuel Pueyo · May 26, 2021 ·

Miguel works for a law firm that employs 10 lawyers. He has been tasked to run communications on behalf of his firm. During team brainstorming sessions they often come up with many new marketing ideas. 🤯

Although this is nice and he feels energized after each brainstorming session, the challenge he faces most of the time is that these ideas end up not being implemented. When he presents a concrete plan to invest time and money in one of those ideas, there is rarely a green light from the board. There is always an excuse to delay the action for another time.

One cause of this problem is the natural governance process inside law firms having many partners in the top (not a single boss) & thus having different views on how to communicate and do business development.

I somehow empathize with Miguel’s law firm, I understand the situation. In today’s volatile and uncertain world it is really difficult to choose an appropriate communication channel or strategy. It’s a tough decision. This post is about helping you to make the decision making process a bit less difficult, based less on intuition, but rather on data.

Try to be different

I was once told by the Eubelius‘ head of communication that when it comes to law firms’ communication, they are all copying each other = They lack creativity.

This is the opposite of what you should be doing. You should start thinking about true difference – finding the tactics and spaces where not some many firms are yet present.

my daughters t-shirt has the answer — My daughters t-shirt has the answer

Looking at that empty white spot might give you a predatory advantage over the competition.

Far too many law firms focus on the same channels (see table at the end)

What are the channels that are the most saturated or used by your competitors? Try to be different

Try to focus on fewer channels

You should never try to do all. The challenge is to find the one that will work the best for you and, once you find it, put 100% of your resources on it. It’s all about doing what works – not what you think should work, or what your peers approve.

A method to find what works

Start with a table like this, select all the ideas that come to your mind and list them in a table asking yourself questions like the probability that this idea works, how much will it cost, how much results you think it can bring and how much time you would need to run an experiment.

In the example of Miguel, he has 6 ideas in mind:

newsletter
videos
podcast
direct letters to potential clients
publication in specialized legal journals
LinkedIn posts with updates from the firm

Testing and experimenting are the only ways to find what works

Choose two out of the list and start to run an experiment. An experiment is an action that takes you little effort, but can get you far in learning and succeeding.

An example:

If you choose letters, count more or less 4 weeks: one week to create, one week to print, quite some costs for distribution and one week to evaluate how many people signed up digitally to your call.

If you choose newsletter, send an email to 10 people asking to subscribe to your newsletter. Wait and see how many of them finally subscribed.

These tests should be designed to roughly answer the following three questions:

How much will it cost to acquire new customers through this
channel?
How many customers are available/reachable through this channel?
Are the customers that you are getting to through this channel
are the kind of customers you want to have right now?

Once you have undertaken a targeted experimentation with a few of these channels, you need to choose one (1) laser focus on the core channel is more promising according to the data you collected through the experiments you made.

Law firm communication channels

social media posts from lawyers

social media campaign

a publication in a specialized law review

PR with journalist. being quoted by a journalist

specialized forums by sector (ex. energy)

Lawyers directories Chambers y Partners, FLR y Legal 500.

Personalized messages to their clients

Webinars

take your client for lunch + word of mouth

make bigger publications

a white paper (download it and give us your email)

show success stories with your blog

content marketing: writing for the blog (SEO)

newsletters

videos

podcast

The interconnected lives of ants, bees, humans and software. Placing diversity as enabler of a legal innovation strategy

Manuel Pueyo · Apr 22, 2021 ·

Nature is full of examples of successful collaborative processes, both intra- and inter-species.🐢🦈🐋🦜🌳

Collaborative structures in natural ecosystems often involve a diversity of species, as in the case of plant-animal win win collaborative networks. Members of these systems (the actors) play different roles, reflected in different services. For instance, in pollination networks, while the plants provide some food resource(nectar) to the animals🐝, the animals mediate pollination by transferring the pollen between plants.

There are more and more people looking at nature in order to find inspiration for improving practices and processes inside organizations.

What do legal organizations say and do when they talk about innovation? Could they also be inspired by nature? Forum, a publication from Barreaux De Bruxelles, the lawyers association in Brussels region, has published an article called Academie Digital Des Avocats in which they explain that in order to become digitally enhanced, a lawyer must innovate in order to push his client to see their problems from another angle. (“an avocat innovateur pour pousser son client a voir ses problematiques sous un autre angle”.) In other words he or she must be an “solution architect” bringing to the table expertise from different backgrounds.

I think we should all welcome and celebrate these words🎉🎉. This is totally new for a sector that was, until now, never really challenged or driven by innovation. Compared to other economic sectors (fashion, car industry, agriculture or banking), under strong pressure to innovate, law firms never had a reason to innovate. It was not in their DNA. That was clearly “a thing” for the others to do.

In the last 2 years I had the chance to speak to hundreds of lawyers👂. From my research “discoveries” I select 3 cases where I see innovation happening or at least intended. I also went to nature and we got inspired by what I saw there.

Big , Medium and Small they are all innovating (or at least they try)

The solution they try to bring in the innovative examples below might be technical, legal, psychological or human, business strategy or processes. When a team wants to offer new services in a new field, it’s called innovation. Some examples below…

Big global law firms: We want to be a business partner and legal is only part of it

I quote directly what I’ve heard from the communication department of a firm that has more than 1500 employees:

We should focus our efforts targeting the problems of the clients. If you want to provide advice that goes beyond legal, we have to focus on “the things” that matter to the general counsel or CEO. For example, if they have an issue with their staff, they have to deal with it asap, otherwise they will loose profit. We have to give them that kind of advice and make them feel we understand their business. They expect from us that we know not only about legal stuff, but also about their real problem.

Medium law firms

I met a company in Brussels that employs 12 lawyers giving advice on financial issues. They want to move from purely legal advice to offering value-based leadership, team culture transformation, and training on how a company should pay attention to ethical issues.

Small one-person law firm

I also had a nice walking conversation with Brussels based lawyer Severine Evrard. This year she is launching a very interesting training program or Mastermind as she calls it. Masterminds can help you have a better control of your professional life as a lawyer: how are emotions affecting us? how can we improve collaboration and better manage our time?

Lack of diversity in law firms is hindering innovation

Diversity is what keeps natural ecosystems alive. As we learn lessons from Covid-19, we see that a lack of biodiversity makes us more vulnerable to infections and diseases.

If you want to solve diverse problems you need to understand that only a diverse population is going to help you solve them.

I am going to be clear and very direct. I don’t see enough diversity in law firms. Law firms only hire lawyers. And often sometimes they only hire lawyers from the same university. This must change if the law firms want to innovate in the way described above. Otherwise they just end up “copying” one another.

Isabel Parker, chief legal innovation officer at Digital Legal Exchange in the UK says that cognitive diversity, working with multidisciplinary teams does bring better outcomes for clients, and thinks that the legal profession should open up to a more diverse talent pool.

In these times we live, diversity in the business environment is more than just bringing different business profiles. It also includes gender, race and ethnicity. It now includes employees with diverse religious and political beliefs, education, socioeconomic backgrounds, sexual orientation, cultures or disabilities.

How can diversity bring innovation in legal teams?

In a volatile and complex business scenario you need a multidisciplinary and diverse team to “build” a new service.

This relevant service you want to introduce has to be designed, ideated, prototyped, bugdeted, coded, measured, packaged and sold and this requires different skills.

A Boston Consulting Group study found that companies with more diverse management teams have 19% higher revenues due to innovation. This finding is significant for tech companies, start-ups and industries where innovation is the key to growth. It shows that diversity is not just a metric to strive for, it is actually an integral part of a successful revenue-generating business.

How can I include diversity in my firm?

Start by looking at what you have

Try to sense and feel what drives the members inside your team. Try to unlock hidden or under exploited potential. Maybe you have team members who like to draw diagrams✏️, learn data science📐 or bake cakes. All those capacities need to be acknowledge and exploited during the ideation and implementation phase of any innovation.

Recently I talked to a lawyer from a Brussels firm with 12 people. He took 1 year off legal duties to focus on content strategies, “legal design” and business development in general.

Those diverse individuals inside are often put in the spotlight or expected to help their colleagues get it right. Don’t leave them alone and give them air support and empowerment instead💪.

Start putting in place some “smart” metrics

Lord kelvin is often quoted on this, “if you cannot measure it , you cannot improve it”.

If the leaders inside law firms do not put in place measurable, specific and achievable goals on diversity inside the firm, it is just not going to happen.

Rethink your recruiting tactics

Your culture will be shaped by future recruits. Be proactive about the types of people you bring to your team. your job specifications should reflect your new values.
Start recruiting people with different profiles. and treat them as good as you do with your lawyers. I often see the non lawyers are considered inferior because they don’t invoice as much cost per hour.

Ecosystem Thinking

Understand that wicked problems are too complex to be solved by one organization alone and acknowledge the need for collaboration of a diverse ecosystems to achieve the change they are working towards. Try to approach problems with design thinking, systems design, and ecosystem mapping.

Combine diversity with affinity to your brand, vision and values

Too much diversity might also be difficult to manage. When you bring people who speak different “business languages” you need to combine this with some affinity in the form of a strong common goal and vision for your team.

If you want to stay in touch with us for more topics at the intersection of legal design , innovation and tech please subscribe for free to the Places of Learning Newsletter.

Computers_read_law

Manuel Pueyo · Mar 23, 2021 ·

We are living a specific moment in history when the old and the new are co-existing in the same time and space. Legislation can be seen as a document read by humans (the old). But a piece of legislation ⚖️can also be read by computers, making connections and relations across documents and allowing ecosystems of developers and innovators to create new apps and services on top of that. This is the vision of Aeco Legal a legaltech startup. They just release what is called an API. A piece of code that allows interoperability between law (as code) and other apps. We had an interesting conversation about this with Thomas Aergerts. Watch the video here.

4 Reasons why your lawyers should use markdown for drafting documents

Manuel Pueyo · Jan 28, 2021 ·

As a content strategist specializing in public sector and legal firms, I have spent a large proportion of the last 15 years using Microsoft Word for drafting web content. Microsoft Word is undeniably a fantastic product and .DOCX files are likely to remain the default format for sharing and editing legal and business documents for the foreseeable future. However, when it comes to the initial drafting of legal web content in Microsoft Word, you should be aware of much better (and more user-friendly) alternatives existing in the market.

Are you a marketing or communication manager with high working standards? Do you work for a law firm and you believe that writing a qualitative, highly personalized web content is the way to achieve your goals? Do you know that writing good content is a team work effort and would like to involve your lawyers in a fluid, frictionless production work flow to succeed with your legal marketing blog? Then this post is for you.

Does sending the DOCX draft via email to your colleagues so they can incorporate their contributions and then translating it to HTML for the web upload is a common practice?

Considering some of the things listed above, I think there are many reasons why you should consider using markdown format. It is a document file format that was created for writing “simple text” and it serves as a bridge between document drafting and a web page.

Get your lawyers writing code without scaring them

We did a survey recently among lawyers and we found out that almost half of respondents were interested in learning a coding language.

In the digital era your text has to be understood by both humans and machines. But they read it differently. While humans read the words, the machines need additional help which is the so called “code” or “markup language”.

Markdown has certain features that makes the writer, when formating the text, unconsciously inserting markup language that computers understand. This requires a little training, but in a very short period of time your writers will start inserting markup language and doing it in a way that does not hinder the writing process, such as inserting hyper links, headings or lists. That can be done by simply typing characters with your keyboard.

Your lawyers will start seeing that what they write is a very simple code only visible to them as writers, and that it is not the same thing as what the user sees when the text is displayed on a web interface. I see this as an easy and less scary way to get your lawyers be introduced to programming and coding.

Never get stuck with a particular software vendor

There are two benefits of using markdown:

Conversion versatility: your markdown file can be easily converted into other types of files: html, pdf, mjml, .DOCX, you name it. In order to do that, you need to familiarize yourself with software conversion tools, for instance Pandoc.
Work with different text editors: as you can see in the video, the same file can be opened locally or in the cloud with different tools. I personally use Retext, Typora and Zettlr. But there are many more available in the market depending on your operating system. Your lawyers are free to choose the one they prefer.

Only use your fingers to write text that computers can decode

When I start drafting, I don’t need to think about the style, fonts or images. I just want to get into the writing flow, focus on the text, have a good writing experience and remove any distractions from my sight.

I don’t need, at this stage, to be interacting with an overloaded screen full of options. I just want my words to flow in an easy way that bridges my mind and the text in front of me. I also like to use my hands (and not my mouse) to introduce characters that are needed to enrich my text for web publishing: things like hyper links, bolds, headings are easily inserted with the keyboard by typing characters.

Here is a tutorial where you can learn the basics to get you started in 30 min. It takes a little practice to get familiar, but once you start, there is no way back.

In the past I used to use Microsoft Word for drafting, but I found I was offered too many features that I did not need and it complicated the writing process. I also felt that the software was too heavy and with the high risk of overloading my computer memory and crashing.

The future of fast and agile content production – writing is Markdown

I have recently discovered a set of web creation tools and cms that are really interesting and I can’t wait to test them. A combination of tools like Hugo, Netlify and Forestry totally changed the game for web creation and here is why:

there is a new wave of tools for creating websites that can load your websites faster. And they are all using markdown. Unlike WordPress, Drupal or Joomla, you don’t need a database.
Changes in content are considered commits and therefore are kept track of it’s version of using git. No more loosing track of who suggested what change. This also allows the editors and developers to speak the same language when it comes to keeping track of who is doing what on the site.
you can edit your posts in markdown and quickly push up your post as markdown documents.

I am Manuel from BigKids, digital reinvention consultant. I am passionate about bringing the teams together to create good content. I see content as a fuel for building excellent digital experience. If you would like to take part in a markdown demo, feel free to contact me or subscribe to the Places of Learning newsletter where we regularly organize meetups around those topics.

Happy typing!

7 Reasons why you should encourage your lawyers to take part in an open source software development project

Manuel Pueyo · Jan 27, 2021 ·

This is a post dedicated to the HR community in law firms.

It’s quite well known among managers that Alphabet, the group behind Google, allows their workers one day per week to work freely on their own projects. Those projects could be anything, ranging from working on a business idea, a new software prototype to taking a course or engaging in a social activity with other colleagues.

In this post I would like to suggest an idea that law firms could be doing something similar to boost their digital transformation.

An open source project is a software development project that brings together people from different backgrounds to create a new software tool that they find useful and necessary for the society. Incentives to take part in such a thing can be different and not always monetary. Sometimes, participants simply want to show their skills 💪, learn something new or meet new people and make professional connections outside their circle.

HR team should play a key role in driving transformation and digitalising lawyers inside their teams. You should be out there discovering open source projects and building a bridge between the projects and your team of lawyers.

Below, I am going to list some ideas on why your lawyers should be joining an open source project.

Skill up = Learn digital tools and processes

You learn so many things when you connect with people that have different backgrounds: tools, practices and habits of highly independent and motivated people.

You don’t need to be a software developer to take part. Your contribution can be non technical and non-IT related. But you are required to have an open mindset towards the use of digital tools and processes.

For instance, when I joined my first open source project, it required me to get familiarized with Github in order to understand how these multiple team members collaborated to keep a record of contributions. And I found it extremely inspiring. I discovered a new way of drafting that can be applied to any writing project and since then I use it for my own collaborative document creation.

Psychological benefits: align your workers with a good cause

HR should support such initiatives. Quite often, open source project has a social and non-profit dimension. Participants intend to contribute to something that doesn’t work well. Your lawyers can benefit from taking part in such a project and help make the world a better place. They could get different rewards at different levels fulfilling human need of unity, community, belonging, compassion, and many others. It would boost participants’ motivation and increase their creativity while directly contributing to staff’s well being and bringing positive effects on your business.

Place your lawyers outside their comfort zone

Getting outside the comfort zone is an absolute “must” for a successful digital transformation of any team. In a highly volatile and uncertain world, you need to learn being comfortable with uncertainty. It doesn’t feel comfortable when joining a new team with different practices, codes and ways of working, but it becomes highly rewarding once you adapt and start to get it. You turn your growth mindset on, your brain expands and you start to appreciate different perspectives, practices and working cultures.

Due to their nature of work, lawyers tend to work and communicate in a relatively small and limited circle. How can this be changed? How it could be challenged? An open source project would be a great opportunity to mingle with the professionals from other disciplines, contribute to other sectors and have societal impact.

Employer branding: attract new young talent

There are many studies on the millennial and what actually drives them. Like all the others, young law graduates also want to have some meaning in their work. They wish to join a team whose work makes sense. They are the driving force that intend to bring change and transformation to our society. Thus if you want to remain an attractive employer, make sure to give space, time and encouragement to your people to work on their projects.

Companies need to be bold and position themselves strongly on what kind of society they want for our future

We see more and more successful companies that want to have positive impact on this world. This article from Jubel in FR shows that sustainable and circular business are the ones who did better in a covid crisis context. If this could be done with actions rather than words. Take action by choosing the right open source project that could fit with the vision and the values of your company. For example Loyens & Loeff joins open source and nonprofit consortium the Accord Project

Understand the logic of collaboration: the power dynamics of decentralized meritocratic organizations

There are thousands of projects popping up that consider motivation and allocate resources in completely different way than most of current companies. They are offering interesting methods and working practices and see collaboration as an essential part of the culture of any decentralized project. In order to stay competitive in th future, it only makes sense to integrate collaborative mindset in your working processes and company culture.The future could be decentralized.

New ways of working with documents

We are in 2020. Is legislation still being drafted in Word documents?
Documents are more than a thing you read, write and print. We need to be moving towards a method of co-drafting that is more agile, clean and allows to keep track of all contributions! But also a method of co-drafting that allows machines to make sense of them. Open source project development could be a perfect environment to test new ways of drafting legal documents. See as an inspiring example this project of legal code documented in git version

What are the concrete examples of open source projects in Belgium?

This year I have been taking part in Open Justice. The project has a great momentum, gentle vibes very welcoming and open minded contributors, also working on ambitious projects like a document database to make public case law (link in French).