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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.

Screencaps from the Torys iPhone App

Torys LLP has launched what appears to be the first Canadian law firm iPhone application.  Available as a free download via the iTunes app store, the app includes sections incorporating the firm’s twitter stream, publications, a lawyer directory, video content and firm contact information and maps.

While they may be first to market in Canada, this app is not something that has been haphazardly banged together – quite the opposite in fact.  The firm has clearly put some solid thinking behind what information should be included and how it is presented.  For example, the lawyer directory goes beyond a simple list to include the lawyers’ photos, short form versions of their bios and links to the full website versions.  The contact information includes GPS functionality and live directions to their offices.  As already noted on Slaw:

The GPS features might be useful for visitors to Toronto, or the hapless OCI student trying to find their way to an in-firm interview.
The app might even be useful for that cocktail party where you know the lawyer across the room works at Torys, and quite embarrassingly cannot remember their name.

Earlier this year well-known legal blogging and technology thought-leader Kevin O’Keefe of LexBlog wrote on his blog about why firms should forget about building an iPhone App.  To summarize his arguments, Kevin says: 1) in a sea of 150,000+ different apps, yours will never get found or widely used, and 2) the logic behind building a law firm app is flawed because that’s like asking people to download a separate app for every content source they follow instead of using well-known destinations where content is already aggregated. For those reasons, he concludes that developing an iPhone app is a waste of resources and time and makes your firm look silly by demonstrating a misunderstanding of how content is consumed online.

I have great respect for Kevin and he and I see the world alike more often than not, but on this topic I think he’s DEAD WRONG.

My position is that the goal of a large law firm iPhone app is not to be magically discovered by the world at large in that giant app-sea of games, productivity tools, and time-wasters.  Rather, it is to provide existing and prospective clients that already have the firm squarely on their radar another access point and contact opportunity, and to strengthen their sense of connection with the firm.  If I’m a new client sitting in the lobby in advance of my second meeting, I might very well appreciate having easy access to the names and faces of lawyers two, three or four that I’ve only met briefly even though I already know my primary contact well.  If I’m a General Counsel sitting at the airport and find myself with a half-hour flight delay, I might well browse through my apps and decide to scan a few headlines from the firm’s twitter feed, which the app makes dead-simple for me to find.

As an end-user, the mere presence of the App on my phone also creates ongoing additional top-of-mind awareness for those firms that do make it onto my system, every time I scan through my phone, which is daily.  Kevin himself points out in his post that the way we consume content is changing at lightning speed.  That being the case, why would we presume to speak for whether or not it is “silly” for someone else to consume law firm content via a standalone app instead of via a blog, a twitter client, or a website?  If there is one thing the 300 channel tv universe and the explosion of social media online has shown us, it is that we don’t all want our content in one homogenous fashion.

Kevin also writes that he thinks the upcoming iPad is going to be “a game-changer”.  Well guess what – those standalone law firm iPhone apps he dislikes are going to work from day 1 on the iPad and could be great high-tech “lobby material” in lieu of the traditional printed firm brochure – that would send a pretty clear message to clients about the level of technological savvy they can expect from their counsel.  My money also says that the firms building iPhone apps now are also going to be the early adopters in getting blackberry versions rolling as well and while there may be apps beyond count in Apple’s store, there certainly isn’t yet in the blackberry world, where a heavy concentration of lawyers, in-house counsel and corporate clients reside.

I also had the opportunity to speak with Torys’ Chief Marketing Officer Stuart Wood earlier today and he made several points that solidified my thinking on this topic even further.  Mr. Wood pointed out that the project was neither expensive nor particularly time-consuming, and will provide the firm with real data about usage and adoption rates, which they can then use to make better decisions about further iterations, supporting other platforms etc.  He also reports that initial feedback from clients in the first week has been both significant and highly positive and is frequently coming directly from the clients to their own lawyers as opposed to marketing or firm management. Other firms’ I.T. departments are also calling their peers at Torys to find out more about the technical aspects. When the client is taking the initiative to make contact with your lawyers directly to congratulate you on a new marketing initiative and have a chat, and the competitors are calling to see how they can replicate what you’ve done, my money says the small investment in developing that free app has just paid for itself in spades.

The Canadian Bar Association’s National Magazine recently published their inaugural survey of Canada’s best law firm websites in a feature article in their December 2009 issue and I am proud to report that Skunkworks client Bull, Housser & Tupper LLP took home two awards – one for the best law firm website in British Columbia and a second for the best student recruitment website nationally.

In making their determination, the magazine asked a panel of nine legal technology professionals, including web designers and consultants, for their views and rankings, including Skunkworks’ own Client Services Director Marni Macleod, LL.B. (Fans of due process can rest assured however that Marni was duly excluded from pitching or voting for our own work). You can read more of Marni’s thoughts about what makes a good legal website on our agency blog and download a pdf of the full National article here.

Turning to the blogosphere, on New Year’s Eve Stem Legal’s Steve Matthews also announced this year’s winners in the 2009 Clawbie Awards, where two more Skunkworks’ clients fared well. David Bilinsky’s Thoughtful Legal Management blog and the Courthouse Libraries BC’s new blog The Stream were winner and runner-up respectively in their categories.

In reviewing all of the winning entries in both the Clawbies and the National article, I am heartened by how far legal marketing on the web has come in this country over the past decade. The depth of content, the overall level of design, the adoption of current technology and the resulting competitive differentiation that the leading firms display as we enter 2010 makes me excited for what’s to come in the year(s) ahead. My congratulations to all of the firms and lawyers recognized in these recent awards.

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