By Jack Rodway
Innovation for law firms can come in a whole host of different forms. Sometimes it’s achieved through digital transformation. Sometimes it’s the transformation of a company’s culture. Sometimes it sees the traditional partnership model turned completely on its head.
In a competitive market in which everybody is trying to shout about their ‘innovations’, is there a risk of messages losing their edge? How can a company ensure that its message stands out above all others and that it gets the attention it deserves? These were the some of the key themes unpicked at a roundtable discussion hosted by Clare Rodway, managing director of legal PR consultancy Kysen, attended by 20 or so of the legal profession’s leading marketeers and communications specialists as part of The Lawyer’s virtual Marketing Leadership Summit.
Before opening up the discussion to the floor, Rodway touched on four key points businesses should consider when promoting a new product.
“You must first ask yourself: is it really an innovation? Sometimes it seems every simple software launch is branded a ground-breaking AI innovation.” She explained that throwing around these words carelessly can be seriously damaging to a brand. “The risk is that people won’t listen when you do have something truly innovative to shout about. Thorough market research – and not just in the legal sector – is the solution, and can give a business confidence that its offering truly is innovative.”
It’s then vitally important to be clear what the new thing is. “Yes, it’s ground-breaking. Yes, it’s like no other. Yes, it may transform legal services as we know it. But what actually is it?” asked Rodway. “When communicating your latest innovation, think about the journalists’ mantra – the ‘who, what, when, why and how?’ Vague buzzwords aren’t helpful. One sentence should be able to sum up what it’s all about.” The journalist isn’t the only recipient businesses should keep in mind. Rodway explains that it’s also important to think about target audiences – the people reading the media – and what the innovation means for them. “You might not actually be targeting the people naturally most interested in the innovation,” she warns. “You might need to work hard on your message so that it’s obvious on their first reading why the innovation is going to change their lives for the better.”
Finally, Rodway feels that the best way to get traction with any given audience is through a multi-channel campaign approach. “One thing I learned through working in-house at law firms is that once you’re satisfied your business’s innovation is truly unique, you should have a campaign approach to ensure the message is filtered through all channels. Make sure internal communication is solid and create a conversation crib sheet so partners can talk confidently about it. Once the innovation is launched, don’t forget about it – keep pushing the message through your marketing channels.”
Participants then chimed in to give their views. One guest, a head of communications at a top 50 UK law firm, felt that a particularly interesting area to consider was the ‘people element’ and not trying to focus too hard on ‘being innovative’. “Instead of innovation, we should be talking about trying to help our clients and their businesses,” they said. “You’ve got to put people at the heart of the whole innovation process. That’s the only way you can be quick off the mark and react to your clients’ needs.”
Another participant, head of new business at a national UK firm, expressed a desire to do away with the ever- present ‘corporate speak’ that proliferates in messaging surrounding innovation. “Focus less on talking about your innovations, and more on just putting stuff out there that is truly innovative and letting other people judge you,” they said. “As a firm, you may think you lack the budget to be truly innovative but really, it’s not about that – it’s about having the freedom within your business to explore change and do things differently. Tech, for example, isn’t inherently innovative. Freedom of thought is much more important for effecting meaningful change.” They went on to describe the kind of soul-searching businesses need to be doing. “Businesses need to ask themselves: ‘how can we improve ourselves and make ourselves different to competitors? And what can we offer our clients?”
Many participants drew attention to the need for firms to have the proper internal structures, resources and communications in place to support innovation effectively, and ensure that the whole business is on board with what the new initiative is trying to do. “A lot of firms fall down because they have an innovation committee and limit the whole discussion around how to do innovation to just three to four people, and it’s done entirely behind closed doors,” said the marketing & business development director of one of the largest Northern powerhouse firms. “This limits them – these people talk about innovation and it never goes any further. This then draws criticism from employees because it’s not actually coming from people on the ground in the business – it’s just coming from a few at the top. It becomes something that isn’t actually built into the fabric of the firm.”
Another participant expressed the importance of marketing and communications not being seen in a silo, and the need for cohesion between the internal functions of the firm and the lawyer groups involved. Rodway explained that, when putting together a marketing mix, it’s important to always include face-to-face conversations as one of the channels, which often gets missed, and also internal communications. “The last thing you want is for your lawyers and support staff to be meeting with people in the marketplace, and when asked what the big innovation is that their firm is engaged in, they say ‘oh I don’t know, it’s something the marketing team dreamt up!” she said. “That completely undermines what you’re trying to do.”
One participant agreed that internal communications is vital to innovation and keeping everybody on the same page. “Momentum is really important,” said the senior PR and communications manager of a UK top 50 firm. “Often, there will be a lot of excitement about the innovation journey at the start, but people perhaps internally underestimate the amount of effort involved in pushing it far enough. It can be hard to keep momentum up and keep that momentum going long term – then you enter a situation when it becomes something only a few individuals know about. That’s something to be very aware of.”
“You have to bring everyone along on the journey with you, particularly when everybody is working remotely,” said one partner at a leading full-service Scottish law firm who heads up its business development team. “It’s important to make people feel a part of the initiatives and the firm.” Amidst lockdown, you may not be able to run the ‘glitzier’ initiatives to keep your teams engaged, they said, but there is still a lot that can be done. “You can circulate crib sheets, host games, or run leaderboards to track your stars in the firm, for example.”
Another participant, marketing and business development director of an independent Scottish firm, questioned innovation versus disruption and where the two come together. “The word innovation is overused. I’m much more interested in disrupting positively. How often can you truly innovate when there are so many big organisations like Google and Amazon with huge budgets and the top technology? I’d like more to think about making positive change and, more importantly, where it resonates with clients.
“The word innovation is definitely overused,” agreed the head of marketing and communications at a top 100 UK law firm based in London. “You shouldn’t be going out to clients and saying ‘this is really innovative’. It should be all about ‘does this meet your needs?’ A product might be innovative and impressive but if it doesn’t meet your clients’ needs, what’s the point?” Another participant, the marketing and business development director of a leading global law firm, explained that her firm used to define itself as ‘innovative’ but has recently moved away from that because it simply doesn’t add any value anymore.
Another, the asssociate director of communications at a multinational law firm headquartered in the US, shared a story of how they sold in one of their recent products to the media. “We literally said to the media ‘we don’t know if this is going to work’. The partner we were working with to develop this AI solution had never before applied their technology to legal services.” Participants agreed that taking this kind of honest approach with journalists when discussing a potentially ‘innovative’ product is very important, and can yield great results.
Putting client-centricity ahead of boasts of innovation was a recurring theme around the table. “Innovation should be about going to the client and really starting with their issues,” said the marketing, communications and business development Manager of a leading Portuguese law firm. “When pitching and talking to your clients, you need to be talking about what the difference to them will be, rather than talking about what your firm is good at.”
To close out the session, Kysen’s Clare Rodway then went around the virtual table and asked participants to give one positive and one negative of innovation in relation to their firm. A handful of participants shared the view that a real positive of innovation is the fact that at its core it is all about service delivery for clients. By the same token, many felt that a negative was that you can easily fall into innovation for innovation’s sake. As suggested by the head of marketing and business development at a newly-merged full-service firm: “Clients just laugh at you in these instances. Tech companies are out there doing it much better than law firms anyway. Historically, law firms have tended to lag behind. It’s ridiculous for a law firm to try and brand everything it does as innovative.”
Another interesting point raised by the head of marketing at a leading offshore law firm was that a real negative of innovation in legal is that most firms are offering exactly the same thing, regardless of how innovative they claim to be. “In professional services, your technical offering is a given to the client – so it’s difficult to be truly innovative. Where we do have control is our culture and our values. If you truly focus on this, it does come out into client communications and relationships. It’s also important to remember that everyone in a business has relationships with clients, including secretaries and PSLs. That’s why it’s so important to put everybody forward and hear everybody’s voices.”
The general consensus around the table was that law firms do indeed tend to lag behind the rest of the commercial world. The business development coordinator of a full-service Benelux law firm explained that they do not consider themselves a ‘first-mover’ but rather a ‘first-follower’. “In terms of technology, we’re focussed on recognising what’s on the market – not developing it ourselves, but paying attention to anything particularly interesting and being quick to follow it when it’s tried and tested.”
In conclusion, what we heard over and over again during the roundtable was the need to ‘put clients first’. When it comes to marketing a product, it is absolutely paramount to make it more about the end-user than the law firm developing it. Closing out the session, Rodway remarked: “We have coalesced around the idea of putting the client at the centre. Let’s focus on the client rather than get stressed about how fancy or advanced we are because – after all – there’s every chance a law firm will be slightly behind its clients on innovation anyway!”
