State Bar launches lawyer image campaign.

• Date: 15 May 2002

Byline: Jane Pribek

Last week was especially busy for staff at the State Bar of Wisconsin, which isn't unusual for the days before the association's Annual Meeting. What's new this year, however, is that in addition to preparing meeting materials and taking care of countless other behind-the-scenes details, a handful of bar staffers assembled "tool kits" for the 600-plus anticipated convention attendees.

The tool kits are part of the State Bar's Public Image Campaign, as explained in the April 2002 Wisconsin Lawyer, in the cover story entitled, "Branding the Profession."

Wisconsin Lawyer explained that the bar's branding effort isn't a short-term, glitzy advertising campaign to sell lawyer services. Rather, it's a long-term, public-focused communications effort to improve the public's understanding and perception of state lawyers.

Trina Gray, the State Bar's media relations coordinator, says that with a branding effort, the goal is to have a positive, true message come to people's minds when they think of lawyers. Specifically, the message is that Wisconsin lawyers are problem-solvers, expert advisers, and involved in community service. This is supported by the tag line or logo "Wisconsin Lawyers: Expert Advisers. Serving You."

The public image campaign is one of President-elect Patricia K. Ballman's projects, although Ballman, wasn't a bar officer when the idea was initially conceived in the late 1990s by the association's former government relations director, Linda Barth, and others. Ballman, a partner with the Milwaukee branch of Quarles & Brady LLP, stresses, however, that surveys indicate that attorneys in Wisconsin want the bar to do something about negative perceptions about lawyers.

Back in January 1999, the State Bar Board of Governors passed a three-year budget plan - just a "blueprint" for planning, says Ballman - that included $80,000 for an image campaign. The $80,000 was a rough estimate, and specific line items such as the image campaign weren't debated in depth.

According to that meeting's official minutes, available at www.wisbar.org, former Gov. Alexander T. "Sandy" Pendleton, then a District 2 representative and now an associate with the Madison office of Foley & Lardner, cautioned that "this spending could be controversial and if the campaign is done wrong, [it] could have the opportunity to backfire."

Three years later, the project has stirred some controversy - although not to the boiling point by any means.

About the Campaign and the Tool Kits

Gray stepped in to assist Ballman with the campaign after Barth left the bar's employ earlier this year. Gray believes whole-heartedly that the effort will be a success, but she acknowledges the presence of skeptics among the bar's membership.

"There will always be attorneys...