About face: how "broadcast ready" is your team, your firm or your face?

• Author: Roe, Jessica

The written word is coveted by those who surround you. Let's face it--rarely can most legal marketers find an attorney fully convinced of the marketing value in a television appearance. Even in the age of broadband digital, the majority of attorneys are more comfortable being published or quoted in print.

Even if your firm has embraced social media, attorneys may rationalize they can exercise more control over those 140 characters published in a tweet or on the firm's Facebook page than they can over the facial tics that might jump of the screen in a YouTube video or local television newscast.

By comparison, consider those broadcast-savvy attorneys who catch word that a jury is about to return a verdict on a high-profile case and jet to the courthouse where, as a familiar on-air legal expert, they provide "perspective" to the many journalists lined up near satellite trucks. Never mind that some of these on-air experts never enter the courtroom. They end up all over the evening news with nary a connection to the case.

But it's their faces--rather than one belonging to a lawyer at your own firm--that end up offering the well-informed, objective verdict analysis to viewers.

Is a relationship between an attorney and a journalist an effective marketing tool? Those who have cornered the market as on-air legal analysts would say yes. Their donation of time and talent has paid of tenfold, because the general public, and often the business public, knows their name and brand simply from repeated news sound bites. And they may be right.

As law firm management scrutinizes advertising rates for print, online and broadcast media against return on investment, profiling or showcasing attorneys as experts for free may seem an obvious slam dunk.

The question is whether your firm finds value in having select attorneys star in such a role. Even as many firms are building client teams and expanding cross-practice referral business, many law firm leaders do not buy into the idea that an hour spent at the courthouse providing free expertise is an hour well-spent. More often than not, experts who offer themselves up for sound bites are not attorneys from large, medium or small firms, but rather solo practitioners.

As a veteran journalist with significant newsroom management experience, I found the pool of attorneys willing to comment on cases often less than a handful in most markets. Perhaps that's why I still have the pager number memorized for a legal analyst...