Looking ahead: trends for legal marketing hires in 2014.

AuthorScalzi, Jennifer Johnson

The business of developing the law firm's market share, brand and competitive advantage are what top marketers have been undertaking for some time now. The momentum of these efforts has been helped, in part, by lawyers reaching a deeper understanding (and realization) that the business of practicing law must be approached differently because the competition is ready, willing and waiting to step in. Times have changed. Long gone are the days where clients are forever loyal and lawyers can do it all. Lawyers now need help with growing and maintaining their business. They are, for the most part, not innate business developers; they are business doers.

From both the micro- and macro-levels, we made some observations of the top performers in the industry and compared them to the values our clients are asking for (and expecting) from their marketing hires. Based on that comparison, we have developed a list of business themes that legal marketers should be savvy about today to foster their personal success in 2014 and beyond.

From a top-line perspective, legal marketers should be acutely aware of the following:

Measurability of profits is changing. Profits are no longer based solely on billable hours, so helping to establish the costs of delivery and determining profit margins is seen as highly valuable. But marketers cannot perform this function solely on their own. It is imperative that you enlist other internal business service units to get the facts and figures you need to show profit margins and drive change to result in revenue increases.

The convergence of Marketing and IT. Marketing is becoming more and more reliant on technology to capture and manage data on clients and prospects; unfortunately, noted cases of collaboration between the "creatives" in marketing and the "ubertechies" in the IT department have been hit and miss, at best. In our work, we are seeing a progressive mandate by management in law firms for a close collaboration between these two departments. This was predicted by an IBM Institute for Business Value study from 2011 that said:

"While marketing has always been responsible for knowing the customer, now they are required to understand and respond to customers as individuals. Marketing can only do this if they can manage vast amounts of unstructured data, make sense of it with analytics, and generate insights that are predictive, not just historical --all on a massive scale. To connect with individual customers at every...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT