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It seems entirely sensible to me that a debate around the value of law firm brands should be happening now with the LSA having created the opportunity for external capital to be invested in law firms. Those investing will want to have some basis for ‘pricing’ their investment. As with consumer brands, where the value of the brand recognises that the business has value beyond the ‘physical’ assets necessary to produce the product, so law firm brands will have a value beyond the physical assets of the firm, namely the number of lawyers, office infrastructure, IT, etc. The value of a law firm’s brand will be closely linked to its reputation, the quality of its client base, the nature of its work and the quality/reputation of its lawyers undertaking this work. At this point, it is important to avoid confusing name awareness with brand. Just because a firm is large and well known, doesn’t necessarily mean that it has a strong brand. It is also important to compare like with like. I would argue that the strongest legal brand in the UK corporate market is Slaughter and May. Comparing its brand strength with, say, DLA Piper which operates a completely different business model servicing very different client needs is very dangerous. Clients of these two firms often want very different things: while a Slaughter’s client may be dismissive of DLA Piper’s offering, the reverse will also often be true. Having agreed that brand valuation for law firms might be a useful thing, before we all get vexed about the way we are going to calculate this, most law firms that I come across need to do a lot more thinking about what sort of a ‘brand’ they want their firm to be and how they will build this. There is much more on my website on this topic (http://wheelerassociates.co.uk/wheeler_marketing_model/building_the_brand), but fundamentally firms need to think about three things: their positioning in the market; the behaviours they want from their lawyers and staff; and, finally, their image.

20-Mar-2012

1:59 pm