In my last column, I talked about “working the room”. Attending events is an important part of for business development for lawyers. I focused on how to open conversations, rather like delivering your opening line in a play. But opening the conversation is only half of the skill needed for working a room; the other half is closing a conversation gracefully so that you can move on.

Let’s revisit the reason why you’re attending such an event. Working a room is work: you’re there to develop business. But business development is a process; don’t expect to walk away with a piece of new business that very evening. Your goal is simply to meet people and find a reason to follow up with them. The people you meet are probably there for the same reason, so don’t feel bad about bringing the conversation to an end and moving on. You’re helping them meet their goals too—especially if you move on by introducing them to someone else.

Easier said than done? For some people, closing the conversation is harder than opening it in the first place. There are many reasons for this. You may be enjoying talking the conversation; moving on and starting all over again seems like such hard work. Or you may not be enjoying the conversation, but can’t get a word in edgeways to make your exit! Or the person you’ve been talking to starts looking around the room. Whatever the reason, focus on the outcome, which is what will you do next?

As you wrap up a conversation, you need three things:

1. A reason to follow up
2. The contact information of the person with whom you need to follow up
3. An exit line

When taking your leave, recap your conversation and state how you will follow up. Note on the person’s business card what your follow-up will be (“Send newsletter”, “Introduce to employment lawyer”, etc.)

If appropriate, take your leave by introducing the person to someone else at the event, which might get you into your next conversation, too.

What’s the right moment to bring the conversation to a close? When you’ve achieved what you came for. Supposing the person you’ve been talking to isn’t the person with whom you’re going to follow up? Or maybe you don’t see how that person can help you? Leave on a positive note anyhow, A. because it’s good manners (and good manners are the best business development technique of all, but more about that in another column) and B. because you never know. If the person you’ve been talking to is the best contact you’ve ever made, it will be even harder to move on, but easier to leave on a positive note because you’re genuinely looking forward to following up.

When you follow up, continue with the “it’s about them, not me” theme. People respond well to offers of help, so you can follow up with:

• Ideas for how they can get better results
• An introduction
• Resources or information
• An appointment to meet

Above all, focus on what they need, not on what you want to sell.

And the best way to bring this article to a close? With a few good exit lines, of course.

Ten Good Exit Lines

• “I'll let you have a chance to talk to some other people here, but I really enjoyed our conversation and I'd like to continue it, so is it OK if I give you a call?”
• “I hope you enjoy the rest of the evening (meeting, conference, etc.) I’ll send you our newsletter on….."
• “I have to go and speak with…..I’ll see that you get an invitation to….”
• “I have to make a phone call. I’ll get that information for you and send it along next week.”
• “I see ………..has just arrived. Would you like me to introduce you?”
• “I’d like you to meet our specialist in ………She isn’t here this evening, so are you available for lunch next week?”
• “I see someone I need to talk to. I’ll pass on your request to…….and have him call you.”
• “I enjoyed meeting you. I’ll be in court all next week, but could I give you a call the week after to discuss this further?”
• “I have to help with the program now, but I’ll set up a meeting for us next week with…”
• “It's been great talking to you. I’ll look for you at [next event].”

Do you rank attending law firm social events right down there on the popularity scale below having a root canal? If so, you’ll identify with a young lawyer in one of my seminars. He’d been told to attend a cocktail party being given by his practice group. Here’s how the evening went: “I had to work late, so when I rushed up to the boardroom, it was full of people at least 20 years older than me. I knew no one, and everyone else seemed to know everyone.” Another lawyer shot back: “Think yourself lucky. At our client event, I was the youngest, I knew no one—and I was the only woman in the room.”

First things first: law is a business of relationships. It follows that to develop business, you have to develop relationships. Much of this relationship-building takes place at events where you’re expected to start up conversations with people you don’t know.

Young lawyers are expected to “work the room” at firm events—but no one teaches them how. If they consequently avoid events like the plague, they become senior lawyers who find themselves tongue-tied at firm events. That’s a great example to the younger lawyers in the room!

The first thing is to remember that working a room is exactly that…work. It may be a social event, but you’re not there to kick up your heels and let down your hair. You’re there to work. So, just as you wouldn’t dream of going to a client meeting unprepared, you should never go unprepared to a work-related event.

Probably the most important information you need is who will be there. Who do you want/need to meet? What can you find out about them beforehand? What do you want to ask them? If your firm has a marketing department, they can help you with this. If not, a quick Google search should turn up major facts and possibly recent news.

Ideally, there should be a strategy meeting of the lawyers attending the event. If you have a marketing department, they should set up this meeting and bring any information on the guests. The lawyers should then strategize about who should meet whom, who should be introduced to whom, and what questions to ask whom. It’s more effective to work in teams of older/younger lawyers or lawyers from Practice Area A and Practice Area B.

Above all, lawyers attending the event should understand what the firm’s interest is in inviting the guests on the list. Relationship-building consists of making connections, deepening existing relationships, and maintaining long-standing relationships. At a minimum, you should know who on the guest list is a client and who is not—yet. Your marketing department can help by creating differently coloured nametags for clients.
The other thing to understand is that your goal is not necessarily to come away from the event with a piece of business; it’s to make contacts and have a reason to follow up with them. Since relationships are long-term, this event is part of a continuum that needs to be kept going.

Small, practical details make a big difference in overcoming that sinking feeling as you enter the room. Arrive early so you can start up conversations with people entering the room after you, rather than walking into a full room where everyone is already talking. Act like a host; it makes it easier to circulate and be at ease yourself when you’re trying to make other people comfortable. As you circulate, join groups of three to five people, or someone who’s alone. Two people are more likely to be having a conversation where an interruption would be intrusive. Put your nametag on your right side so that people shaking your hand can see it clearly.

Starting up the first conversation is a lot like delivering your first line onstage. If you can remember your first line, you’re off. Nametags can often give you your first topic of conversation. Maybe you know someone else in their organization, or maybe your research turned up some information about the organization. Keeping up with the news is important for anyone who regularly attends events: you’ll be very glad you invested the time when you meet someone whose company or parent just purchased another, or was purchased.

Whatever the topic of conversation, listen twice as much as you talk. The more opportunity you give the other person to talk, the greater an impression you’ll make. You develop a relationship by listening to the other person until you’ve found a point where you think you can help.

Once you’re into a conversation, if it didn’t begin with business you need to steer it in that direction. Ask about the type of business and their role. Ask about any changes, issues or problems that affect their business: what could they be headed for, and what might they need from you as a result? Find the problem—even when clients don’t know they have one. You aren’t looking to solve the problem right now; you’re looking for a reason to follow up.

In the final analysis, what people will remember is not what was said—after all, less than 20 percent of information is transmitted through words—but how it felt to be talking to you, the emotional imprint of the conversation. As long as you keep the spotlight on others and make them feel like stars, the emotional imprint of your conversation is immense.

Opening a conversation is only half of the skill needed for working a room; the other half is closing a conversation gracefully so that you can move on. I’ll talk about that in my next column.

This scenario will be familiar to any marketing staffer in a large law firm: the phone rings and it's someone asking why you haven't sent them the firm logo for their program. You have no idea what they're talking about, but apparently your firm is sponsoring their upcoming event and if you want your contribution acknowledged, they need your logo ASAP.

After wasting your morning trying to track down who initiated this sponsorship, you discover that it was booked three months ago by a partner in the firm. Many of the benefits in the sponsorship package have passed, except for attendance at the event and the firm's logo in the program. The partner doesn't plan to attend the event next week and oh yes, you'd better start looking for eight people to fill the table.

An exaggeration? Any law firm marketer who administers sponsorships will have a raft of similar stories. My particular favourite involved the partner who committed the firm to sponsor a conference organized by one of his dominant clients. The benefits included having a firm speaker on the program, presenting an award at the gala dinner, and having our logo in the preconference advertising and gala program. The first I heard of it was from a lawyer whose area of specialization was the precise topic of the conference. A client had asked her if she could get him a complimentary ticket to the conference since our firm was a sponsor. My ear caught fire when she called to ask why she hadn't been told about the conference!

Sponsorship budgets in large firms can run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Even in medium-sized and small firms, the money allocated to support community and client initiatives forms a significant part of the overall marketing budget. Worse, the time consumed trying to select which events/activities to sponsor is often wasted.

So, should the sponsorship line item in marketing budgets simply be erased? Or can more value be extracted from these initiatives? Even more important, is there a rational way to select which initiatives to sponsor?

If certain sponsorships can't be avoided, at least maximize the value your firm receives. If you have a marketing department in your firm, let them negotiate the sponsorship package with the organizers of the activity. You wouldn't want your marketing staff writing a factum, would you? So don't attempt to negotiate a sponsorship package if you've never done it before and have no idea what constitutes value.

Here's how my above example should have played out: after receiving the call from his client, the initiating lawyer should at minimum have called the Marketing Department to notify them of the sponsorship. At best, his answer should have been, "Love to help you out, Mr. Client. Can I get my marketing people to talk to your marketing people and see what we can do?" We would have leapt on the speaker and award opportunities, maximized the advertising placement or even traded it for something else, ensured that the firm's logo received premier positioning, and seen to it that the firm's table was strategically allocated to the right mix of lawyers and clients. The lawyer wouldn't have had to do a thing.

But what about choosing the right initiatives from among the myriad opportunities that land on most lawyers' desks? Doing something "because we've always done it" is seldom a good use of marketing funds. Even the smallest law firms can benefit from an evaluation of their sponsorship spend. This can be as sophisticated as an assessment tool that scores each opportunity or as simple as asking "What do we get for our money?"

As with everything in marketing, it helps to have a goal against which sponsorships are measured. You may want to increase your clientele from a certain industry, or obtain more work from an existing client, or increase referrals from a referral source. Does a sponsorship offer opportunities to support those goals?

The biggest bang for the buck comes from firm visibility, so it's important to assess how the firm will be visible. By having your logo in the program? Pfffftttt. By having a lawyer introduce a speaker? Now you're talking. Especially if important firm clients and referral sources are seated at the firm's table, which is prominently positioned towards the front of a room filled with people from the industry/client group that you're targeting. And what if every lawyer present at the event collected business cards, fed them into the firm's database, and followed up promptly with each new contact??

Pinch me, I'm dreaming.

If I offered you a free means of advertising your name, profession and contact information every time you sent an email, would you leap at the chance? Surprisingly, many lawyers don’t.

I’m referring to the email signature—an electronic version of your business card that you can attach automatically at the end of an email message. It’s a neat and tidy way of letting everyone know your name, your firm, your contact information and anything else you care to add—every time you send an email message. Many lawyers still send emails without an automatic email signature. At best, this is a waste of an opportunity. At worst, it’s downright inconvenient to your contacts.

Large firms set up email signatures for everyone in the firm, with rules for their usage. In that situation, the IT Department wants something technologically simple that will arrived unscathed in the recipients’ mailboxes, the Marketing Department wants something that reinforces the firm’s brand, and the lawyers run the gamut from wanting to include their life story to being completely unaware that they have an email signature. (“Who cares? I’m on my handheld all day anyhow.”)

So how do you arrive at rules for usage? Let’s deal with visual aspects first. Given that you have no control over how your recipients set their computers to receive email (plain text? HTML? Rich Text Format?), the simpler your signature, the more chance it has of being received in a readable state. I took a decidedly unscientific poll of my colleagues on the LMA Toronto Chapter Board: their pet hate is the email signature that’s set up as an image block and arrives in your inbox looking like an attachment. A similarly unscientific poll of the talented writers and editors in our local TorMentors Group revealed a loathing for names in ornate script—especially when the signature arrives looking like computer code. (TorMentors? No, we don’t torment, we mentor each other, in Toronto.)

As tempting as it is to dress up an email signature (Logos! Colours! Wingdings! Photos! V-cards!), such temptation should be resisted. A plain text email signature that arrives looking exactly as it did when it left the sender’s computer is worth a great deal more than broken links that require you to download pictures. What’s wrong with colour? Nothing, as long as it’s your firm colour and it’s used judiciously. And if you don’t mind that half your recipients won’t see it because their companies set their email to receive in plain text.

Now let’s talk about content. What MUST be in an email signature? At minimum, your name, your firm’s name, your phone number, and your email address. Yes, your email address. You may wonder why: it will be at the top of the message, won’t it? Not necessarily; your message may be forwarded with the message header stripped out.

OK, what about postal address? These days, any further information can be provided by a link to your firm’s website. Most recipients will respond by email, not snail mail. Ditto for fax numbers. Yes, I know there are practices where the fax still hums day and night, but I’d much rather sign, scan, and send a PDF that looks like the document, rather than a fuzzy fax.

So what about including your practice area, or special qualifications? Lots of room for discussion here. I’ve sat through heated debates in large firms where certain practice groups or individual lawyers are at odds with the firm’s strategy. Let’s say the firm wants to present itself as one unified entity from sea to shining sea. Doesn’t matter where an individual lawyer is located—the firm is nation-wide. In fact, there’s a highly specialized group within the firm whose target market is completely local. They don’t take kindly to being told they can’t put their practice area or their location in their email signature.

Mid-sized and smaller firms may find it easier to grant their lawyers more choice. For example, if you’re one of very few certified specialists in your practice area, why not include that in your email signature? However, a proliferation of different information on each signature runs the risk of diluting the firm’s brand just as much as a proliferation of non-firm colours.

Should you include cell phone numbers in email signatures? If you’re on the road all the time, you may want to be reached by cell phone. However, if you won’t be in a position to take cell phone calls, don’t give out your cell number. Just remember to check frequently for messages—and return the calls.

And then there are the quotes and the taglines. Don’t be tempted to expound your personal beliefs in your business email signature; you’re sure to offend someone. If you can find a short, pithy saying that supports your practice, that’s another matter. Toronto litigator Simon Schneiderman favours a line from Demosthenes: “Good fortune can be ruined without good counsel”. Taglines can come back to haunt you: their message may be at odds with the content of your message. Let’s say your firm’s tagline is something like: “Your success is our business” and you have an aggressive litigation practice. The recipient of an email message outlining how your firm intends to sue the pants off his company may fail to appreciate the irony of your tagline!

Email signatures can be extremely useful for disseminating important messages like a change of name or address. Make sure the message is important—to recipients. You may be very proud that you’ve just been elected head of your practice group, but clients don’t care. If you use your signature for temporary messages, ensure that someone has the job of monitoring the changeover from one signature to another.

What about links to social media? If you’re active on LinkedIn or a blog, a link to them from your email signature can help drive traffic to them. But a row of icons, all in different colours, all competing for the reader’s attention? Too distracting.

My Pet Peeves

• Scrolling. Don’t make me go down there! If your email signature occupies more screen real estate than your message, something’s amiss. Set up your signature to read horizontally: put your phone and email address on one line.
• No signatures on replies and forwards. Reading through a long string of emails is irritating enough without having to scroll down to the bottom for the sender’s contact information! If you don’t want to repeat all information, set up a shorter email signature for replies and forwards.
• Lengthy disclaimers. Believe it or not, some firms append 12-pt disclaimers in ALL CAPS in both English and French.  Edit your disclaimer and use a small font!

Good Rules of Thumb

• Keep it short! I keep mine to three lines.
• The average email window can accommodate 50-80 characters across. Operative word: across.
• Use common web fonts that are legible at a small size.
• Set up an email signature on your handheld device.
• Send test emails to see what your signature looks like at different settings.

The bottom line with email signatures is that communication should trump marketing. Don’t let the bells and whistles obscure the main message: your name, your firm’s name, and your contact information.

Does anyone out there have any other pet peeves and rules of thumb?

When did you last review your website profile? Can’t remember? Then it’s out of date and not working for you. 

Lawyer profiles are the most-read section on law firm websites. They are also the most readily adapted law firm marketing materials, so there’s no excuse for letting them languish. If you’re submitting a proposal to, or meeting with, a prospective new client, you can tailor your profile to suit that client’s needs. A profile is a work in progress, like a will.

Like any other piece of good writing, your profile should keep the reader in mind. There’s a very provocative blog post entitled “Your clients don’t care where you went to law school”. I happen to disagree with the title (some clients care very much where you went to law school), but the point is well taken: it’s all about the client.

And that’s what differentiates your profile from your resume. Your profile should present those things about you that help a client choose you and not some other lawyer in your field. Your resume should be a complete summary of everything you’ve done, updated at least annually. Think of it as the database from which you draw items for your profile.

So what does the average website visitor want to find out about you? Most likely four things:

• What kind of work does this lawyer do?
• Has he/she done the kind of work I need done, for clients like me?
• Would I like working with this lawyer?
• How do I contact this lawyer?

What kind of work does this lawyer do? 

A good profile should include several up-to-date examples of the lawyer’s cases or transactions in as much detail as privacy laws will allow. Representative work is the lifeblood of a believable bio: it’s the archetypal example of ‘show, don’t tell’. 

Too often this section of a lawyer’s profile will contain pallid phrases like “has advised and represented numerous clients in the [whatever] sector on a wide range of matters over many years”. That could describe just about anyone! You frequently see phrases like “His/her practice is focused on…” followed by a long laundry list of topics—in other words, no focus at all. The best examples of representative work give a succinct description of the issue, the lawyer’s approach, and the result. 

Since many lawyers have more than one string to their bow, you may need more than one profile. A fairly common example would be the banking lawyer who specialises in financing real estate purchases. I’ve worked with several who by right of experience straddle both sectors very comfortably. They’re listed on both the Banking and Real Estate pages of their firms’ websites and they attend meetings of both groups. They maintain two separate print profiles, but their websites can accommodate only one, so they steer carefully down the middle, giving examples of representative work from both areas. 

Has he/she done the kind of work I need done, for clients like me? 

Again, an up-to-date list of representative work is essential. Think about the kinds of clients you want and include examples of your work that will convince them you’ve been there, done that successfully—and could probably repeat the process for them. 

It isn’t essential to name the client, but at least give the reader the chance to judge whether the client was comparable to their situation. An in-house counsel for a multinational looking for local representation will be interested in your local knowledge and standing. A mid-market client takes a Goldilocks approach: are your clients too big, too small, or “just right”? A client needing specific expertise is more interested in the nature of the issues you’ve dealt with.

Would I like working with this lawyer?

Now we’re moving into the subjective realm. If you’re thinking that no one can tell whether they’d like to work with you without meeting you, of course you’re right. But prospective clients can check you out any time, long before you’ve even heard of them or know that they’re looking for a lawyer in your field. 

You may love golf, while the client prefers opera: so what? If the client gets the sense from your profile that you’re someone who takes an interest and makes an effort, that’s what they’re looking for. Your objective is to position yourself as someone whose main focus is on the client’s issue. You need at least a sentence that sums up not just your experience but also your attitude to your work. In a comment on Robert Ambrogi’s The Art and Science of Lawyer Bios, Corinne Tampas said: 

What I do look for from a website is whether I get the feeling that a particular attorney is willing to roll up his or her shirt sleeves and work on my file without vying for the billable hours of the year award. Simply put, the fact that a lawyer is a lawyer presumes a basic level of competence. What I am looking for in a lawyer is to get a matter resolved in a fair and expeditious manner. I think that other than at the corporate level, most prospective clients are looking for the same thing.

This point is particularly important for those lawyers whose practices are to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from the practice of any other lawyer in that field. Maybe you’re a real estate lawyer who works hard to ensure that your clients know what they’re getting into and understand the implications of the advice you’re giving them. Even though the deals you’ve done are the same as those of every other real estate lawyer, you can differentiate yourself by making a statement about the way you approach your work.

How do I contact this lawyer?

Don’t make the client search for this information. Organize all your contact information and unchanging details like year of call and law school in one easy-to-find place on the screen or page. Professional graphic design is well worth it: this is your most-read marketing piece, remember. It’s also worth remembering that the people you want to reach are busy and mobile: ensure that the design of your firm profiles is optimized for mobile devices. If you’re on Twitter or LinkedIn, insert links to both in your contact information. If you promise 24/7 availability, make sure your contact information includes a cell phone number or other alternative to your office phone number. 

Ah yes, the Year of Call. Very junior and very senior lawyers often object to stating their year of call in a profile and will argue that it doesn’t matter. I happen to think clients have a right to know the seniority of the lawyer they’re hiring, but if that argument doesn’t sway you, here’s another response to The Art and Science of Lawyer Bios:

For me, the most telling indicator is a negative one, the absence of basic quantifiable data. Year of graduation from law school, year of admission, that sort of stuff. Its absence is a big red flag, telling me that this is a newbie trying to pretend he’s experienced and willing to conceal material data to do so.

What do you look for in a lawyer’s profile? What do you think make one lawyer stand out from the crowd? What do you find irritating about lawyers’ profiles? What do you find useful? All comments welcome. 

At one time, only the public sector issued requests for proposal (RFPs) for legal services. Now, the financial services sector, publicly traded companies, and not-for-profit institutions are all issuing RFPs for legal work. In my last column, I talked about debriefing after responding to RFPs, whether you win or lose. There’s a lot to be learned from both successful and unsuccessful proposals. 

Another essential piece of record-keeping for proposals is finding out whether you won or lost. This is akin to closing a file properly after a deal or a case. Seems like a keen grasp of the obvious? You may be surprised to know that law firms with an up-to-date, complete, accurate record of their wins and losses on proposal are very much in the minority. 

There are many reasons for this. If proposals in general fall under no one’s portfolio and are managed separately by each practice area in the firm, no one may ever have asked how many proposals the firm wins or loses. Even if your firm has a Marketing Department that has charge of proposals and makes valiant attempts to record wins and losses, they may not get the information from the lawyers. Why not? Again, there are several reasons:

• Because the lawyers haven’t followed up with the client. RFPs don’t actually say, like job ads, “Only successful candidates will be contacted”, but fewer clients these days are sending rejection letters—or any acknowledgment of receipt. You have to follow up with them if you want to find out for sure that you didn’t get the work.
• Because the client didn’t hire anyone. I’m still awaiting a decision from a very high profile public sector body that issued an RFP a year ago. In some cases, the client never intended to hire anyone; they just wanted to shake up a complacent incumbent.
• Because the lawyer doesn’t want anyone else in the firm to know that the firm’s proposal didn’t win. I cringe whenever I hear the words, “Oh don’t worry, this is just a formality, they have to put the work out to tender, they’re going to keep us, it’s OK.” If an existing client issues an RFP, that’s a cue to take extra care with your proposal.

Let’s say your firm is winning only about 20% of the work for which it submits proposals. Is the reason for this dismal result to be found in your proposals, or in your firm’s choice of work on which to bid? I’ll deal with the bid/no bid decision in another column, but a check of proposal weighting criteria should give you a clear insight into the client’s priorities. I say ‘should’ because such criteria are sometimes vague, sometimes not really applicable to legal services—and sometimes respondents don’t read them. 

Weighting criteria should tell you which of the following is most important to the client.

• Price. Can you make an acceptable bid that still allows you to do the work profitably?
• Level of expertise. Can you cite enough representative work in the field to make your firm stand out against the competition?
• Full service. Can you field a competitive proposal team in all areas?
• Timing. Can you effectively staff a project to complete it within the client’s timeline?

If the criteria are vague, don’t hesitate to ask for clarification. I’m always amazed by how few questions law firms ask when they’re about to bid on work. There seems to be a reluctance to reveal that you don’t know something. This is sometimes provoked by the rules of the competition, where answers to questions will be circulated to all competing proponents. What will do you more good—guessing at clients’ intentions or having their intentions publicly clarified? I advocate as much personal contact ahead of time as the rules will allow. Go and see the client if that’s permitted. If not, and questions must be sent through a procurement office, ensure that your question is understandable to someone who is not a lawyer.

What percentage of wins is acceptable? In a very competitive field, a 50% win rate might be very respectable. In areas where your firm should dominate, a 50% win rate should cause firm management to question what’s going on. Compare win/loss ratios across practice areas: if your firm averages 35% wins overall, but your Real Estate Group is winning 75% of the work it bids on, where is the weakness? It might be strategically more advisable to respond to fewer RFPs in an area where your win rate is only 15%, or perhaps that group should be looking for different RFPs where they have more chance of winning.

So are proposals worth the effort? At the risk of sounding like a lawyer, it depends. In certain practice areas like Construction Law or Municipal Law, you don’t have much choice. In areas like Corporate Finance, you probably wonder what all the fuss is about.

On the plus side, work done to complete proposals is often valuable to other marketing efforts. Many lawyers’ profiles and lists of representative work are kept up to date solely because they participate in proposals. For regional or smaller firms that can compete on price, RFPs are a chance to compete for work from a marquee client that will open other doors for them. Sometimes it’s worth responding to an RFP to put your name in front of a client so that you get on their list for next time. You might submit a proposal for the experience, since each proposal completed is fodder for the next. 

For marketing staff, working on proposals provides valuable insights into the firm’s areas of expertise. Also, proposals enable marketing departments to make a direct contribution to business development.

But no one in their right mind spends the time that proposals take just because the information might come in handy for the general marketing effort. That’s why it’s worthwhile to review your wins and losses. Proposals are a big investment—make sure you’re getting a worthwhile return. 

Responding to a Request for Proposal (RFP) is an expensive exercise. Proposals are labour-intensive, often last minute, and have the capability of greatly enhancing or diminishing a law firm’s reputation with the recipients. 

Lawyers find proposals intrusive on their billable hours and think that their marketing staff should be able to handle the process. However, even the best marketing staff, who can research the prospective client and pull together a decent first draft, needs input from the lawyers on the proposal team. They need the lawyers’ insights on the client’s legal needs. They need relevant, specific examples of the firm’s work. They need to know what fee proposal the firm is willing to make. And someone must decide who should be on the proposed client service team. 

Stress levels mount as the deadline looms.

You wouldn’t make a major investment in equipment, or hire an important staff member, without doing your homework. Proposals are a similar investment. So with all this value tied up in proposals, more law firms should be tracking whether they win or lose—and why.

Most marketing consultants recommend debriefing after a firm has put in a proposal to a prospective client—whether the work was won or lost. Why? For the same reason that most marketing consultants recommend doing client surveys—to find out what the client is thinking, and whether the firm’s approach to that client is the right one. 

Most law firms, on the other hand, don’t debrief after proposals or survey clients. Why not? Usually because they believe they know what the client thinks, or they don’t want to take the time, or they don’t think they’ll like what they’ll hear, or someone doesn’t want anyone else to know what happened. 

Debriefing, both internal and external, should be a core component of the proposal process in law firms. Why did the firm win the work (what can we learn that we can repeat)? Why did the firm lose the work (what did we do that we mustn’t repeat)? What has been the firm’s track record with proposals and why? What is the firm’s track record against other firms? This knowledge will tell us how the firm compares to the competition, and give insight into how the firm is perceived in the market. It will also document strengths and weaknesses. 

Finally, profitability of work won on proposal should also be tracked. This will allow the firm to be judicious in its choice of work worth pursuing.

Internal debriefing with team members

Everyone involved in the proposal, both lawyers and staff, should discuss how the presentation went, and why the result was what it was. Notes from the debriefing should be recorded with the proposal. The debriefing should be approached in an open-minded way; it’s a learning session, not a blame-fest or a victory lap. If it is done for each proposal, win or lose, there is more chance of it being seen as an essential part of the process. An appropriate senior lawyer should chair this process. 

Questions to ask:

• Did we have the right team?
• Did we address the client’s issues?
• Did we get the appropriate references?
• Did we fulfill the requirements of the RFP in a timely manner?
• Where could we have improved
  • our research?
  • our presentation?
  • our materials?

External debriefing with the client

Many lawyers think that clients will be irritated by a request to debrief. Actually, many RFPs specify how and when the client is prepared to give feedback on proposals received. Clients actually welcome debriefings: they show that the law firm cares enough to find out how its team did. They’re an opportunity to educate law firms about client care. Above all, they help to improve the standard on both sides of the bidding process.

It’s important to position this with the client as an exercise in quality control, not an appeal for a different decision. If a debriefing is not specified to be part of the RFP process, request one. In fact, if there’s an opportunity to ask questions, ask for a post-decision debrief when submitting questions. 

A senior lawyer who was not part of the proposal team, or a senior marketing staff member, or a third party consultant/researcher should interview the client, whether the work was won or lost. The interviewer should definitely NOT be the lead lawyer on the proposal team. I’ve found that clients will be far more candid with a neutral third party than they will be with the lawyer who signed the proposal documents. 

In my next column I’ll discuss what can be learned from tracking proposal win/loss ratios.

In a previous column, I talked about managing expectations when you hire a marketing consultant or agency. Being clear about why you’re hiring a consultant and ensuring that everyone in your firm understands those expectations will get the relationship off to a good start. 

But how do you go about choosing the right marketing consultant for your needs? First, Beware the Brother-in-Law! So many law firms find their suppliers through their families. In-house marketing staff cringe when they hear the words, “My brother-in-law can do that.” That choice is being made not because of what is best for the firm, but what is best for the family relationship. (Actually, it’s usually terrible for the family relationship too. Bad idea all round.)

Do you need a large firm or a sole practitioner? That decision is just like choosing a law firm. If you need national coverage on a large volume of services, or you have frequent bet-the-farm issues, you likely need a large firm. Chances are you also need to issue a Request for Proposal, but that’s a subject for another column. If you want a single point of contact who can take all of your marketing needs off your shoulders, advise you on what to do, and manage other marketing suppliers, an experienced sole practitioner will be your best bet. 

A business person looking for legal advice generally asks colleagues and other advisors like accountants, insurers, financial advisors, who they use and why. That’s not a bad way to choose a marketing consultant either—at least as a start. Ask other professional services firms who they use and what the results have been.

But don’t stop there. Here are some questions to ask of your prospective candidates:

Has the consultant done this kind of work before, for this kind of firm?

Big agencies will tell you that it doesn’t matter whether you’re selling legal services or laundry detergent, the principles are still the same. Yes, but the way you apply them is completely different. I’ve seen really good agencies crash and burn over law firm clients. They’re used to being the experts and calling the shots. When they’re marketing a law firm, the product talks back.

Can the consultant provide references?

If so, check them out! Ask particularly about the consultant’s or agency’s role. Did they handle everything on the project or did the firm have to find their own suppliers for parts of the work? Ask if they’re still working with that agency and if not, why not?

Can the consultant provide all the services we need?

Perhaps the most important service you need is a marketing plan that will tell you what you should be doing to market your services. Be clear from the outset whether you want your consultant to provide both the plan and its execution. No one can do everything, but can they marshall the resources needed? How well connected are they in the field? What industry associations do they belong to? If the consultant is a sole practitioner, can he/she pull in a graphic designer, web developer, photographer, or translator at a moment’s notice? Ask them what they wouldn’t take on. Anyone who professes to do everything is going to do some of it badly—perhaps the bit that’s crucial to your firm.

Some consultants/agencies are great all-rounders; others are great at one aspect. I once worked on a new publication for a client that used a terrific design company for its marketing materials. They were great at the initial design, but once we moved into production of each issue, they couldn’t cope. They were used to having total control and they weren’t used to all the changes that take place as a magazine is readied for publication. They quickly recognized that this wasn’t the business they wanted to be in and passed us on to a very competent independent production person.

Maybe you will eventually need a marketing staff in house—can the consultant/agency help you with that?

Does this agency have experience in all the media we want to use?

Marketing methods are in a state of massive change. Even two years ago, it was a novelty to find a law firm on Twitter. Now most major law firms have Twitter accounts. If the agency you’re considering shows you beautiful brochures but can’t tell you about any social media campaigns they’ve done, you’re looking at a print specialist. If that’s what you want, great. If you want to be advised on what marketing tools you should be using, chances are this isn’t the agency for you.

How long have they been in business and how well do they appear to be doing?

There’s a lot of turnover in the marketing field, so consulting is sometimes regarded as what you do while you’re looking for “a real job”. But executing one-off projects on an outsourced basis is just freelancing, not consulting. There’s a big difference. A consultant should be able to advise a law firm about its entire marketing effort. Anyone who’s made a reasonable living as a marketing consultant over a sustained period of time is doing something right. Ask how long they’ve been working with their regular clients. 

Similarly, agencies spring up fast and can fade away just as quickly. I once had to use an agency where the principal was a personal friend of the CEO. (Remember: beware the brother-in-law!) I didn’t get a good feeling from the agency right from the first, but the CEO was insistent that we give them the business. In the 18 months that I was dealing with these people, they changed the name of their agency twice. When I asked why, their answers were vague. I wasn’t surprised when they disappeared overnight and we had to scramble to find another agency to take over in mid-campaign. 

What are our dealbreakers?

Know what you can’t do without. For example, if an important part of your marketing is done in French, your consultant/agency should at minimum understand the complexities of working in two languages, even if they don’t speak French themselves. They should know that a tagline or slogan must be tested in both languages and can’t necessarily be translated literally. They should know (and allow for) the fact that French text usually runs longer than English text. They should be able to work with your translators and/or provide excellent translators themselves.

Would we like working with this consultant/agency?

Chemistry and trust are very important. Marketing is a very subjective area; it’s not like providing a legal opinion. Has the consultant been a client at some point? Working on both sides of the client/agency relationship gives insight into forming a productive relationship. Read what they’ve written: is it full of marketing jargon? Will that drive you crazy? Then don’t go near them. I don’t suggest choosing a consultant solely on the basis of personal preference, but it’s really important, once you’ve determined that they have The Right Stuff. Your marketing consultant or agency should make you feel good about yourselves, hopeful about developing new business, and excited about marketing initiatives. 

I’ve spent a lot of time listening to corporate counsel over the past few weeks. The examples they give of how their external law firms “don’t get it” never cease to amaze me. For instance, the GC of a large financial institution said she was once told by her litigation counsel, “Look, it’s our factum; that argument stays in.” Not only did the argument not stay in, but neither did the law firm! 

I’m sure most readers will think, “No one in our firm would be that stupid.” So let me ask you this: if an important client offered to bring her in-house team to your law firm to talk about what an in-house counsel deems important, what would your answer be? If you said you’d welcome them with open arms and make sure there was standing-room-only attendance at the presentation, go to the top of the class and give out the pencils. 

Sadly, that’s not what happened. The GC in question has a road show whichhas been very well received by the few law firms that have accepted her invitation. What’s startling is that when offered this opportunity to get inside the mind of a major client, a number of law firms haven’t been interested. 

So what did they miss? First of all, an opportunity to convince their client that they’re interested in continuing their relationship! Not showing an interest, or not responding at all, speaks volumes. In relationships between clients and their law firms, no news is decidedly not good news. As the GC commented, “If you don’t get feedback, I may just have walked.” When you get the chance to have your client tell you their perspective on your provision of legal services, invariably there will be an opportunity to understand the client’s business further. Understanding the client’s business is number one on the requirements list for most general counsel: as another GC said at a panel discussion a few days later, “We’re looking for people we don’t have to bring up to speed.”

Have you ever asked your clients what’s important to them? There’s a lot of cyberchatter about doing client surveys and client interviews, but even just plain old “How are we doing?” phone calls can go a long way. As the GC of the financial institution said, “Don’t presume to know what we want or need.” She notes that what she really needs as a client is often overlooked: “I wish more firms would do a better job of understanding my day.” 

In my experience, the biggest assumptions are made when the client is another lawyer. Being an external advisor to an organization is very different from being an employee of that organization. External lawyers don’t have the same responsibilities as in-house counsel, who have to support the corporate direction, create and stick to a budget, report at least quarterly, often more frequently, on progress against plan, handle cutbacks and downsizing, and generally do more with less. External counsel assume that the only point of discussion with an in-house lawyers will be fees, yet the research tells us that the attributes clients value most are service-related. 

A common criticism, especially from larger clients, is that some law firms love to send lengthy opinion letters outlining all the options in a given situation, but offering no recommendations. Risk analysis is what clients need, but it’s not what some firms want to offer. Another aspect of this is a sense of proportion: as this GC said, “Your matter may be a very small piece of my life. I may have already decided that I don’t need a Cadillac on this one.” If you don’t get that message, don’t expect to get the work either.

And the simplest things, which cost nothing, can often make a BIG difference: the GC noted, “I get 250 emails a day. If you write a good subject line, I’m much more likely to read your message!” 

In my last column, I talked about staffing the marketing department and deciding whether you need to “rent or buy”. Almost any marketing function can be outsourced if attention is paid to maintaining relationships, but being clear about expectations is important from the outset.

The first step in getting the most out of a marketing consultant or agency is to be clear about why you’re hiring them. Law firms usually bring in outside marketing help for one of four reasons:

• Something needs to be done, but you’re not sure what 
• You know what needs to be done, but you don’t have the expertise in-house
• You know what needs to be done, you have the expertise, but your resources are already stretched to the max
• You know what needs to be done , you have the expertise—but your lawyers aren’t listening 

Simple, right? Not so fast. If you’re not sure what needs to be done, you need advice. You would be smart to look for a consultant who can give strategic marketing advice and has experience with law firms. An agency that’s used to product marketing has never worked in a situation where the product talks back. They will want to tell the lawyers how it’s done—and we know how well that will go down.

OK, but supposing the advice you’re given is to start a blog and execute a social media campaign: are you expecting the consultant/agency to do that for you? If so, have you checked out their capabilities for execution as well as strategic advice? And if you’re clear that the consultant’s mandate is to advise, do your lawyers understand that? Reputations and relationships can be ruined by lawyers who don’t understand what the consultant was asked to do. If you want the consultant to produce a plan first, and the lawyers want to see brochures magically appear tomorrow, they will begin badmouthing the consultant, grumbling: “How much do we pay these people anyway, and what do they do for us?” 

If you know what you want, you need both production expertise AND advice. You may know what you want, but not what you need. Expect a good agency to ask a lot of questions about your firm, your practice—and your clients. The more you know about where your work comes from, which are your profitable practice areas (don’t forget that profitable means revenue minus the expenses of serving the client), which areas could spawn profitable niches, and generally, what the firm’s strengths are, the better guidance you can give your agency. Most consultants want to start with research in order to make informed decisions: the more you’ve already probed your practice, the less research the agency will need to do.

If you have the expertise in-house but are lacking capacity, you need an outside resource that can hit the ground running and produce to expectations. Chemistry is very important in this situation: if the consultant/agency is to work with your marketing team, both sides must be prepared to give a bit and learn from each other.

If you feel like a prophet in your own country because the lawyers aren’t listening, you need a “visiting expert” to tell them what you’ve been telling them. The consultant must understand what you want to achieve and why. Be prepared to listen: a good consultant should advise you on alternative ways to achieve your goal. 

When hiring an external marketing resource, be sure you understand what you’re paying for, and how you will be billed. The way lawyers work, with multiple iterations, is a very expensive way to work with an outside source. It will also take far more time to produce say, a newsletter, if the lawyers want to see the text laid out first—before they make their changes. Be clear on the approvals process you’re going to follow, and follow it! Have a signoff procedure—once the signature’s on the document, no more passing it around for a few other people to look at. 

Regardless of whether you hire a consultant, an agency, or just a freelance pair of hands, you’ll get the best results from giving your marketing professionals time and information:

• Involve them early
• Tell them what you want to achieve
• Tell them as much as you can about your clients

In my next column, I’ll discuss how to choose a marketing consultant or agency. 

In my last column, I said that asking how many people you need in your law firm marketing department is the wrong question: you need to know what you want to achieve and how quickly you want to see results. I also said that the key marketing appointment is the person who is going to lead the charge, whether that person is a lawyer in the firm, a staff person, or a consultant. The important thing is to have someone making the decisions, based on a goal. 

Once you know what you want to do, finding the kind of help you need will be much easier. However, there is one further question to be asked: do we rent or do we buy? I’m often asked what marketing roles “must” be in-house and what can be outsourced. If the relationships are well maintained, just about any role can be outsourced, although law firm administrators usually feel more comfortable with event planning and management of the firm’s contact list being maintained in-house. 

If you need a significant degree of independent strategic thought, creativity, research, or advice, look outside. If your need is temporary, look outside. If your need is fulltime, ongoing, and operational, then you should hire. Once strategy, content and design have been decided, execution and maintenance can be done well in-house.

Rent…?

Now let’s translate that into marketing activities. You might hire a consultant or an agency to produce a strategic plan, a redesign/rebranding campaign, research on new markets, or advice on any of the above. 

Single services, like copywriting, website development or graphic design, can be productively outsourced, provided they are managed by someone who has the big picture of what the firm is trying to achieve and what has been asked of other service providers. Working with professional writers and designers is important if you want your marketing materials to represent you well. There’s a tendency to think that anyone can write, and anyone who knows how to use computer design programs can design. But think of your reputation: law firms can’t afford to look like amateurs, which you will if you use amateur writers and designers.

If you are opening a new office, or forming a new practice group, or merging and changing names, you might want to undertake a concerted media blitz for a defined time period. That would lend itself well to outsourcing to a PR consultant. 

These external relationships work best when service providers are well informed about the firm and its target markets, and kept up to date on new developments.

….or Buy?

Your marketing initiatives will produce better results and cause less disruption to the billable hour if you have the following capabilities in-house:

• Event coordination
• List maintenance
• Website updating
• Coordination with consultants, agencies, and other suppliers (including maintaining budget and inventory)

These functions do not have to stand alone. If you have a good website content management system and someone acting as the editor (this function can be outsourced), several staff people can—and should—be trained to update your website. One of them might also be able to update the database and run events, depending on how many you hold and how many people you invite. 

When I’ve worked in-house, I’ve always wanted on my team that indispensible someone who’s been at the firm for a while, knows how to get things done quickly, knows how the mailroom works, and has good relationships throughout the firm. 

Regardless of whether you rent or buy, marketing professionals thrive on two things: time and information. Involve your marketing people from the outset, tell them what you want to achieve, and give them as much information as you can about the type of client you’re trying to reach.

In my next article, I’ll discuss how to get the most out of working with consultants. 

The title, "Are We Big Enough to Need a Marketing Department?," is a question I’m often asked by smaller and mid-sized firms. Larger firms will ask, “How many people do we need in our marketing department?” Neither is the right question to be asking.

The “right answer” to your marketing staffing needs is in fact two more questions: what do you want to achieve and how quickly do you want to see results? 

If you’re a large, recently merged firm that needs to promote its new name widely and quickly, you need a lot of creative horsepower—for a short period of time. Then you need a sound strategy for the future and a small but experienced in-house marketing crew that has the resources to go outside for help as needed. 

A mid-sized firm that’s done a good job of developing business, but not much to build firm profile, might realize that it needs to vault to the next level. For a while, its profile-building efforts might rival those of its larger competitors and might swamp its in-house marketing resources. 

A small firm with no in-house marketing department and neighbouring competition snapping at its heels may, with guidance, take a long, hard look at its positioning. Its resulting strategic plan might put larger competitors to shame. 

In the above scenarios, the size of the in-house marketing department has very little bearing on the success of the firms’ marketing initiatives. The secrets of success? How closely each firm is prepared to examine its needs and wants and whether it is willing to put in place the right resources to get results. 

In hiring their first marketing person, most firms staff for what they currently do. Someone’s got to organize the golf tournament and the client holiday party and order the pens. Susie on reception can do that, can’t she? But then the website needs updating: who do we hire for that? And we need new business cards, but the old ones were a bit dated—maybe we need a new look, who do we hire for that? You end up with a mismatch of assorted helpers and service providers, none of whom has any direction about what the firm is trying to achieve—because the firm doesn’t know.

So often, law firm marketing discussions start something like this: “Billings are down, we should be doing more marketing” or “The associates aren’t busy, they should be marketing themselves” or “We need to grow the firm, we have to get out there and market.” Nothing wrong with these as a starting place, but often that’s where they finish, too.

When you know what you’re aiming for, you can decide what help you need to get there. Start with your client list: who are your top 25 clients? What industries are they in? What’s in their future? Who referred them to you? An exercise like this can produce surprising results. I asked one client to list their top five referral sources and they were sure they knew who they were—financial advisors, accountants, other clients, etc. They were very surprised when their number one referral source turned out to be—other lawyers. That made a big difference to the resulting marketing plan. 

The key marketing appointment is the leader of the firm’s marketing initiatives, regardless of whether that person is a lawyer in the firm, a staff person, or a consultant. Get the right person leading the charge and every other staffing decision will fall into place. 

In mid-size and small firms, the person leading the marketing charge is often a lawyer or the firm administrator. Too often, the discussion around the management table goes like this: “Harry’s practice is dropping off, let’s put him in charge of marketing” or “Joan’s great, she’s handled the computer project and the office renovations, she’s got billing under control, maybe she can do the marketing as well?” Harry may have lost his drive and Joan is obviously swamped: how good will they be at marketing the firm? It isn’t a question of background or experience in marketing: the essentials for a marketing leader are to have a keen understanding of their clients’ needs, the firm’s strengths, and a drive to make the firm successful. 

In my next column, I’ll discuss the “Rent or buy?” decision in staffing marketing initiatives.