A Blog About Law Firms And Their Clients

I just had the great pleasure of spending the past couple of days at a Zeughauser Group meeting featuring some of the top Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) in the country (approximately 30 in attendance).  They traveled from all over the United States for this meeting.  For those of you unfamiliar with the Zeughauser Group, they are a well organized group of consultants that are focused on advising, consulting and supporting law firms across the country on a myriad of strategic issues, it’s a very highly respected group.  They count among their clients many of the largest law firms in the country/world.  The conference was incredibly well run and is intentionally designed to have only between 30-40 members for this annual meeting.

On behalf of Manzama I was asked to share some thoughts as to the state of social media, specifically with a focus on how business intelligence is evolving and changing with the proliferation of content in the public domain.  It was honor to be asked to present in this forum and we hope that the members of the group benefited from the exchange.  While I am not at liberty to discuss specific firms nor the contents of the program that would be deemed confidential, I’ll share some over-arching themes and messaging that I heard through the two day program:

> All lawyers in firms must be revenue generators.  There was a time when the divide between the procurers of revenue (aka rainmakers) and those partners that do the work was an acceptable divide.  This is no longer the case.  In fact, the divide in terms of compensation paid to the procurers vs. the services is becoming more apparent and growing;

> Most of the leadership acknowledge that lawyers/partners more than ever are open to having others w/in marketing support revenue type of activities, including “selling,” with the expectation that this would become more important w/ each year;

> GC’s interest in social media is growing.  This is substantiated with the findings in the Inside Counsel/Green Target report that I blogged about the other week.

> Directories (Chambers, Superlawyers, etc.) are only meaningful to the partners (sometimes merely to reinforce egos), but GCs do not weigh these directory listings as a key factor for hiring a law firm.  Again, there was some data shared to support this statement, but I think there are still some other valid data points to suggest otherwise;

> Wikipedia is gaining momentum as an authoritative source of information for GCs to help understand and profile a law firm.  However, the group was cautioned to not try and turn Wikipedia into a branding/marketing activity, rather, firms should view Wikipedia as “opportunity to credential” themselves;

> Social Media use is on the rise (blogs, videos, twitter, etc.) in and across all age groups of lawyers and GCs.  Likewise, the ability to “monitor” and understand what’s transpiring in and around a law firm’s brand, practice, industries, clients, etc is becoming increasingly important as firms look to differentiate and reflect a deeper understanding of their client and align themselves across various industries, etc.  Hence, the reliance on ways to find and locate intelligence and act in a timely manner will become service differentiators in the months and years to come;

Bottom line — great group (approximately 30) and I think the next decade will emerge as the decade of the CMO.  In this blogger’s estimation never has this role been more important (I saw the 90s as the rise of the CIO, due to the strategic use of technology w/in law firms, but the emphasis on client satisfaction, business development, positioning, business intelligence have demanded a greater skill set from CMOs than in past decades, and this trend is likely to continue).

Best,

Peter J. Ozolin, CEO

Manzama, Inc.