Law Firm Marketing Brief

It's perhaps no big surprise that the long rumored merger talks between A & O and O & M have now broken off. This is consistent with the evident shift this year away from blockbuster law firm mergers. What were the major stumbling blocks to getting the deal done? Too many vowels and ampersands, as I see it. I mean one important factor very well might have been that it proved impossible to come up with an acceptable name. A&O&O&M is both unpronounceable and a typographical nightmare. Ovary & O'Melveny has a nice singsong quality but just won't do. Branding is all about streamlining messaging (as this story about Katten's recent rebranding makes clear), which only gets harder the more unwieldy law firms become. Maybe the dealmakers should consider bringing the branding team into the discussions earlier if they want to make sure the deal gets done!

Remember the mantra about the real estate business: location, location, location. In the law business today it seems that finding, training and retaining talent is coming to play a similarly critical role. And increasingly, promoting diversity is turning out to be key to an effective talent strategy. See, for example, this story about the overall impact that Mansfield 2.0 certification is having on promoting diversity in law firms today. And also note this story about how PwC has put diversity at the center of its legal recruitment efforts in the UK. And in case you're wondering how this impacts the marketing department, here's an article that summarizes recent research about how diversity and inclusion make for better marketing too.

This article provides some good detail about how lawyers are starting to use AI to gather information on market-standard terms to help improve negotiating outcomes. It's not hard to see how the same AI technology may soon be deployed in other use cases that will help improve marketing outcomes.
A good article here from the LMA about "Service Metamorphosis" -- a strategic approach to law firm marketing developed by the consultant Allen Fuqua. And what exactly is service metamorphosis? It seems to be a fancy way of saying that when it comes to marketing strategy the client always comes first. Hard to argue with that notion.
In a similar vein, here's an article that provides a good explanation of the three basic models of CRM. If you're like me, when you hear CRM you tend to tend of first and foremost about software. But as this article explains, choosing a CRM model really deserves attention, separate and apart from selecting a CRM tool, if you want to develop an effective marketing strategy.
Larry Bodine has a good blog post about how to write durable blog content. This is a great illustration of the importance of walking the walk when it comes to marketing. Part of what makes this worth reading is how well the article illustrates its own theme. In other words, this blog post is very likely to have enduring value for those of us in the law firm marketing game ....

In the past, I've made no secret of my personal belief that creativity lies very much at the center of effective marketing. This is part of what makes good law firm marketing such a challenge -- the inherent clash between left brain and right brain thinking. As an antidote to the left-brained thinking that predominates in the world of law, I want to offer up this article from Farnum Street that summarizes the eight simple virtues essential to promoting creativity in a work environment. These principles were developed by the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather, where creativity lies at the heart of the business enterprise. Whether you're at Ovary or O'Melveny, the question is - how are you going to get these Ogilvy principles to apply?