Corporate Marketing: What Law Firms Can Learn!

I just returned from a very interesting Houston Legal Marketing Association luncheon where the guest speaker, MaryJane Mudd of Full Tilt Communications shared she's learned from her many years working in marketing for many Fortune 500 companies. Great tips and tools that can benefit any law firm's marketing planning.

In summary; corporations always begin any marketing strategy with communicating the overall vision of the campaign; ie: we want to increase company revenues by $500,000 over the next two years. Then the corporation management commits the resources and the time to fulfill that vision from the top down. Many of our clients have the hardest time just getting their partners to agree on an overall vision, let alone committing valuable Firm time and money to the program. But if this step is skipped- one isn't going to get very far in any kind of marketing campaign. The whole exercise becomes a piecemeal half-hearted push with no measurable outcome and tangible return on investment numbers.

Getting to Yes

Once a corporation's upper management buys off on the vision and time/money commitment, it's time to communicate that to the rest of the firm via explanation of what the marketing director is planning to do. Specifics of the plan depend on the vision of the firm but the overall strategy should include: intensive training of associates, coaching and mentoring by the managing partners and incentives for meeting the goals of the marketing plan.

The Fast Forward Program

This program was developed by the law firm of Leonard, Street and Deinard and resulted in $7.5 million in fee receipts over a two year period. How did they do it? Well the program is for sale if you want to see all the specifics but in a nutshell the program involved the following steps:

1. Partner vision and goal
2. Commitment in time and money; for them it was ($150,000)
3. Identification of 20 attorneys with the most potential to execute the program
4. Coaching including business plans for each attorney, goal setting, sounding boards, follow-up
   
5. Outside training
   
6. Events
   
7. Sales Incentives
8. Methods of establishing measurable benchmarks: fee receipt growth compared against goal, then against progress of firm benchmarks and ROI evaluated.

If you would like more information about the program to integrate this into your Firm's business model the program costs $25,000. Here is the contact information:

Jill Weber
Leonard Street and Deinard
150 South Fifth Street, Suite 2300
Minneapolis, MN 55402
jill.weber@leonard.com
(612) 335-1508