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(Authors note:  A version of this article was first published on SLAW

in July, 2010. )

In my experience, lawyers as a whole are not overly enthused about talk of brands and branding. If you must focus time, thought, money or all of the foregoing on a marketing effort of some kind, most would prefer to spend it on something distinctly more tangible – hosting a seminar perhaps, or taking clients to lunch, or even organizing a client golf tournament.  Anything but being locked in a boardroom with the consultant-du-jour talking incoherent marketing-speak as part of an abstract navel-gazing exercise, or being asked to foot an exorbitant bill for a designer squiggle to adorn the firm’s letterhead and business card.  “Where’s the value in that?” many may well (and frequently do) ask.

However, two items in the mainstream news this month relating to Vancouver landmarks have got me thinking afresh about the powerful influence brands can and do exert over all of us.

You Say Stanley Park, I Say XwayXway

In the first instance, a proposal to “rename” Vancouver’s iconic Stanley Park as XwayXway (pronounced “Kwhy-Kway”) in recognition of an ancient Aboriginal settlement in the area surfaced seemingly overnight and caught many Vancouverites utterly by surprise.

While a closer reading of the story revealed that the proposal was not in fact to eradicate the name Stanley Park but rather to add the aboriginal moniker as a second or supplemental name, the wheels of resistance from a startled populace were already in motion.  Comment sections on news media websites were immediately inundated with howls of outrage and vitriol. I noted several hundred comments on the Globe and Mail site alone within hours of the story breaking.  The reactions were intensely visceral – even with dozens upon dozens of what were presumably the most incendiary responses having been expunged from the various media websites for violations of the news outlets’ comment policies. Clearly, a nerve had been touched.

By the next day the story had been covered in all the Vancouver dailies as well as on local TV, and had garnered further national attention. Shortly thereafter, the federal government – no doubt sensing the prevailing political winds – swooped in with an announcement that the Great Stanley Park/XwayXway debate of 2010 was a non-starter, and that the proposal would not even be considered. Game, set and match, nothing to see here folks, please keep it moving.

A Hockey Rink By Any Other Name

In the second story, before the dust even had time to settle on the Stanley Park furor we learned that the Vancouver Canucks’ hockey rink heretofore known as General Motors Place (a.k.a. GM Place, a.k.a The Garage) had been swiftly rechristened Rogers Arena thanks to a shift in corporate sponsorship. Unlike the Stanley Park/XwayXway affair, this time resistance was futile. The twittering classes and sports-talk radio callers were welcome to their opinions and their brand-related chit-chat (of which there has been a great deal), but sponsorship dollars had spoken and the deed was done. Following as it did the temporary re-naming of the same facility as “Canada Hockey Place” during the Olympics, Vancouver hockey fans are now familiarizing themselves with a third name for the same building within the span of six months. As a result, many are left with a distinctly unsettled sensation in that corner of their brains that is reserved for matters pertaining to the local shinny squad.

Most lawyers and other professionals I know like to think ourselves largely above the shallow allure of “branding”; smart enough to ignore the huckster-ish entreaties of marketers, and to make decisions about what goods and services to purchase, use, and invest in based on purely objective factors such as quality, product design, and value rather than illusory distinctions like brand names.

And yet, disproportionate numbers of us continue to buy Tide instead of no-name detergent, and to care what our hockey rink is called, and to have strong opinions on whether a stand of trees in the downtown Vancouver peninsula should be referenced as Stanley Park or XwayXway.  Why?  I suspect that If your clothes were submitted to a blind detergent test you likely couldn’t tell which had been washed in detergent A and which in detergent B if your life depended on it.  The hockey team will play just as well or just as poorly regardless of the name of their rink. Further, the trees and grass in that wonderful Vancouver park won’t change by virtue of the words on the sign, and the grass won’t care what it is called. It’s the same park either way.

I submit that the underlying reason we care about all of these things is identical: the brand has exerted its influence on us. Our experience of the laundry soap, the hockey rink, and the park are all inextricably tied up with specific visual and linguistic cues that the stewards of those places and products have put into place.  Change those cues and you change the experience.

Meanwhile, Back At The Law Firm

So what does all of this have to do with law firms?  Simply this: Your firm’s brand matters.  A great deal in fact.

I am currently working with a handful of different law firms – some new, some of long standing – on name development or name changes.  If branding is truly irrelevant, logic dictates that naming the firm should be the simplest of all marketing exercises.  In reality of course, it is anything but.  Experienced legal marketers (and indeed any partner who has been part of a firm name change and sat in on the decision-making meetings) will tell you that passions are easily inflamed and resentments can run deep when a position on the firm masthead is at stake.  The parallels to the emotional debate about Stanley Park are strong.

So if we can at least acknowledge that brands matter – even to law firms – why is the idea of branding held in such low regard? I believe that part of the reason many lawyers eschew “branding” is that the concept so often lacks the clarity that lawyers invariably crave.   There are seemingly almost as many definitions of “brand” and the process of “branding” extant as there are marketing consultants.

The definitions I prefer are simple ones:

1. Your brand is what people think about when they think about you.
2. Branding is the process by which you try to shape and influence those thoughts.

By that standard, brands and branding are very important indeed.

(Authors note: This article was first published on SLAW in May 2010. )

Earlier this month, British Columbia residents witnessed political awkwardness at a level unusual even by West Coast standards when a special prosecutor cleared B.C. Solicitor General Kash Heed of wrongdoing in a criminal investigation. Mr. Heed was re-appointed to cabinet later that day, only to re-resign the next morning after the special prosecutor stepped down as a result of his law firm’s $1,000 contribution to the Heed campaign shortly before the last provincial election.

The special prosecutor has stated that he was aware of his law firm’s donation early on.  However, he did not consider it an apparent or perceived conflict of interest until too late in the day to avoid the media storm that inevitably followed when he stepped down immediately after exonerating Mr. Heed. The Law Society of British Columbia has launched an investigation, the Premier has called for a review of the process by which special prosecutor appointments occur, and the Vancouver Sun (B.C.’s major daily newspaper of record) has dutifully pulled out a list of other prominent counsel who have acted as special prosecutors subsequent to making political donations to the governing party in B.C.

Let me be clear that I do not have any belief whatsoever that the campaign contribution in the Heed situation had any bearing on the special prosecutor’s decision-making process – a view I’m confident the vast majority of those in the legal profession would share. Despite that, it is equally clear that the very small financial donation in this case has had significant repercussions for each of the Solicitor General, the governing party of British Columbia, the Attorney General’s criminal justice branch, and the special prosecutor and law firm involved.

While unique on its facts, this incident raises the larger question of whether law firms ought to still be in the business of making political donations or campaign contributions.  In fact, the law firm at the center of the Heed incident has subsequently announced that it will no longer make such donations. While some may consider this an example of firmly closing the barn door after the horse has bolted, it nevertheless represents a policy rethink that most Canadian law firms have yet to undertake.

As seen through the lens of a law firm’s marketing strategist, what is the risk/reward ratio of a firm making a financial contribution to a political party or an election campaign at any level of government?

In recent years, we have seen many firms move away from active participation by their lawyers on boards of directors, both for liability reasons and to avoid potential conflicts of interest. It strikes me that when it comes to conflicts, the argument for declining to make political contributions is at least equally strong.

Media reports and opinion polls regularly state that public confidence in the institutions of government, including both Parliament and the judicial system, is decreasing over time.  Meanwhile, scrutiny of these institutions continues to grow. As such, any whiff of perceived bias or potential conflict of interest is certain to be seized upon, both by political factions seeking to take tactical advantage of an opportunity that has presented itself and also by the general public, who increasingly throw up their hands in disgust at all players involved whenever such stories appear in the media. TheVancouver Sun article referenced earlier about other special prosecutors who have made political donations is a classic example of the guilt-by-association ethos that prevails once public confidence founders.

I would also factor into the equation that in any law firm beyond a handful of lawyers and employees, different political preferences will prevail, even within the firm. There will be those who chafe – loudly or otherwise – at the idea of firm funds being spent in support of a cause, party or politician they don’t favour.  The resulting disconnect has a corrosive effect on the culture of the firm.

To my mind, all of the above are reasons why the risk/reward ratio for law firm political donations is frequently too high to make it a prudent part of law firm marketing strategy. Firms interested in pursuing government-related work of any kind need to be both completely transparent and utterly pristine in their dealings with public bodies and political organizations. This will help preserve their opportunity to act in a legal capacity later on.  Campaign contributions muddy the waters, and where mud exists, mud-slinging is sure to follow.

Legal Futurist Richard Susskind speaks to the BCCA Centenary Conference in Vancouver, April 23, 2010

“Dressed smart like a London bloke, before he speak his suit bespoke.”

- Kanye West, from the song American Boy.

Last Friday I had the opportunity to attend the academic and judicial conference held as part of the British Columbia Court of Appeal’s centenary celebrations.  Of the many excellent presentations that day, I was most intrigued by the opportunity to hear first hand Professor Richard Susskind, and he did not disappoint.

Professor Susskind began with an anecdote involving power drills.  As the story goes, Black & Decker routinely takes their new hires for a period of training, shows them a picture of a power drill and asks them to confirm that this is what the company sells, which the new recruits blithely do.  The company then shows them a picture of a hole in a piece of wood (as illustrated above) and advises that this is what their customers are in fact buying – not a product the company offers but rather a solution to their problem.  The message is a stark one – do not become so focused on your current product or service offering that you become myopic and lose sight of the client’s perspective – and their willingness to move their business elsewhere if a simpler, cheaper or otherwise better solution is presented.

Susskind feels that law firms are currently geared towards providing what he calls “bespoke” legal service, by which he means individualized, custom legal advice created for and tailored to the specific client and situation and provided almost exclusively directly by the lawyer(s).  Almost by definition, this sort of personalized attention is a very expensive offering.

He sees the types of legal service or legal staffing possibilities along a spectrum and predicts a transition along this path:

Bespoke>standardized>systemized>packaged>commoditized

Susskind posits that most corporate and government in-house counsel face “a dilemma in 3 parts”:

1. They are being instructed to reduce their in-house legal staffing;
2. They are being instructed to reduce their external legal spend; and
3. They are being asked to assume more legal risk and manage more compliance related activities.

The result is that there is an inevitable and increasing market pull to the right of the bespoke > commoditized continuum.

Susskind asks the critical question:  ”What parts of lawyers and judges work could be undertaken differently – more quickly, cheaply, efficiently or to a higher quality – using alternative methods of working?”  He believes that most lawyers spend too much time doing routine work others can do.

Many lawyers, he says, insist that what they do is not capable of being reduced to a fixed fee or otherwise re-imagined in a way that leads to significantly lower costs, a position he flatly rejects. He points to the fact this commoditization trend is already taking place or has taken place in other complex professions (tax accounting, healthcare) and believes that legal services are not immune to the same pressures.  He insists that we will see more “decomposing” of legal work  - by which he means deconstructing or unbundling complex processes into their task-based components, with many of these unbundled components then being provided by lower-cost, more efficient alternatives such as outsourcing, off-shoring, automated drafting, closed client communities,de-lawyering, etc.

Despite what some may see as Susskind’s negative prognosis for the legal industry, my impression was that he is merely describing the forces he sees at work, and that he in fact imagines a bright future for those lawyers and law firms that recognize the tectonic shifts underway and position themselves for prosperity by aligning their offering with market demands.

Professor Susskind closed with a quote from a local: Vancouver-based science-fiction writer William Gibson, who has famously said: “The future is already here. It’s just unevenly distributed.” I am left with the impression that Professor Susskind has received a greater distribution than most of us.

Personal Anecdote Postscript:

While reading his book, two phrases that Susskind uses extensively – “bespoke legal services” and “decomposing legal services” – rang noticeably off-tune to my staunchly North-Americanized ear.   “Bespoke” exclusively conjures up custom-tailored suits to my minds’ eye, while “decomposing” immediately brings to mind any number of corpse/autopsy scenes from the endless cycle of CSI: Everywhere episodes that proliferate on cable television.  Professor Susskind actually referenced this very point during his lecture with respect to the word bespoke, and confirmed that he had only belatedly learned of the term’s unfamiliarity in this part of the world.

Legal technology fanboy that I am, I availed myself of the opportunity to speak briefly with him in the conference hall after the session and mentioned that the word decomposing also sounded unorthodox to me.  Susskind laughingly informed me that he had similar commentary on a late draft of the book from a close North American friend who is a senior executive at a major American corporation (my memory fails me as to exactly who it was) who also made the decomposing – bodies linkage.  Consider this then my public standing offer to the good professor to “Canadianize” any draft treatises he may choose to publish in the future – a place he seems to already inhabit.

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