On Tuesday, February 21^st, 2012 at 10am PST (1pm EST) West Coast Environmental Law will be hosting the first ever Twitter Moot Court. The event takes the tried-and-true law school practice of mooting and flips it on its head by conducting it via social media. It’s an exciting innovation that will help interested parties explore how traditional legal arguments are translated into modern technology environments.

Presenting a legal argument in “tweets” that consist of no more than 140 characters is certainly going to be a challenge. However, Skunkworks is proud to be sponsoring two students, Matthew Nefstead and Jenn Cameron, from the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria (alma mater to two of us here at Skunkworks).

In total, 5 Canadian law schools have entered teams into what promises to be a fascinating experiment in legal academics. The other schools participating include Dalhousie University, University of Ottawa, UBC, and The Osgoode School of Law. Each tweeting team has its own page here. The judging panel is a an interesting mashup of talent itself, and includes University of Calgary law professor Kathleen Mahoney, lawyer-turned-novelist William Deverell and legal social media wunderkind Omar Ha-Redeye.

The case that the tweeters plan on mooting is the landmark environmental decision West Moberly First Nations v. British Columbia – a precedent-setting decision that confirmed the government of British Columbia has an obligation to protect First Nation treaty rights from incremental intrusions into the habitats of at-risk-species.

In the actual case, the BC Supreme Court found that the BC government had not sufficiently consulted West Moberly First Nations on how to adequately protect the Burnt Pine Caribou Herd prior to issuing mining permits to First Coal Corporation. It was decided that Crown also failed to put in place an active plan to accommodate for the protection and rehabilitation of the Caribou Herd. As a result, the BC Court of Appeal suspended First Coal Corporation’s mining permits.

It’s important to note, that you don’t need to be a member of the Twitter community to watch the latest crop of digitally savvy law students make social media and legal history. You can follow along through the “twitter feed” embedded at http://wcel.org/live-twitter-moot-feed.

Best of luck to all participants!

[This article was originally published on www.SLAW.ca in September, 2011]

We have been watching the ascent of social media in legal marketing for a few years now. Law blogs, once considered a frivolity suitable only for the technogeek outliers at the fringe of the law firm, are now recognized as legitimate business development vehicles at many, if not most, firms. Likewise, other social media channels including Linkedin, Twitter, YouTube and to some extent Facebook, have all been moving (at varying paces) along a recognizable continuum inside the law firm environment that looks a bit like this:

Derision >> skepticism >> grudging curiosity >> cautious adoption >> widespread use

As social media adoption continues to grow amongst lawyers and law firms, a few lessons have emerged. Social media is disruptive in the sense that it does not automatically reward firm size or lawyer seniority.  Smaller, more agile firms and young lawyers can and regularly do play a much more prominent role in legal social media than their larger firm and senior lawyer counterparts. And interestingly, individuals regularly fare better in social media than their own firms do, even in circumstances where the firms are national in scope and have the head start of a multimillion-dollar organization, professional marketing department and a recognizable brand behind them.

Mid-size and large firms in particular seem to struggle when it comes to finding their “voice” with social media, with twitter being the platform where this weakness is most noticeable. To date, most of the larger firm twitter accounts tend to stick largely to a predictable regurgitation of their own firm news releases, new partner announcements and award or ranking achievements. However, when one combines the blandness of this approach with the fact that larger firms are of necessity speaking to a widely disparate group of clients and audiences (the tech startup, the mining giant, the municipal government client and the major bank all have very different information needs) you are a left with a situation where larger firms are using their social media presence to push out a series of almost exclusively self-laudatory items across a scattershot array of industries and topics. The vast majority of these updates are guaranteed to be of little or no relevance to most of the clients.  Little wonder then, that social media users typically opt for the livelier and more useful flow of information to be found in a boutique firm or individual lawyer’s social media feed.  That individual lawyer feed probably focuses primarily around a discrete legal subject area, includes both his or her own content as well as links to other news items relevant to that area from multiple credible sources, and throws in some commentary and personal anecdotes that let the reader know a little bit more about the person behind the post as well.

The good news for firms struggling with this dilemma is that there is an obvious remedy at hand.  We’ve already seen this game play out in the context of blogging. Specific wins out over general. The client doesn’t care THAT much about you. They care mostly about themselves, and the legal issues that pertain to them.  Except in boutique firms organized around a single subject area, the “firm blog” approach has largely withered away in favour of niche subject area blogs that cater explicitly to the needs of a specific audience.  And just as happened with blogging, law firms need to begin adopting a practice and industry group approach to their other social media efforts.  National firms don’t need a twitter account – they need twenty, or thirty.  That way, as a client, I can tap into the one or two that are focused on my industry and my issues, and choose signal instead of noise.  I can get a sense for the specific lawyers who work in my interest area. And I can ignore the completely irrelevant news from the 90% of your firm that has nothing to do with or for me and therefore is of no interest to me. (Harsh but true.)

From the firm side, this approach may seem daunting but it needn’t be.  You already have a practice and/or industry group structure in place.  You need to use it.  Start with the handful of practices that are already self-sufficient in putting out newsletters, e-alerts or a blog and add social media tools to their arsenal.  Divvy up responsibility, and take advantage of existing social media savvy within your teams.  Let individual lawyers “sign” their tweets or updates by adding their initials to the end of their posts (and include a legend in the twitter or social media bio section that connects those initials to full author names).  And then let them use social media the same way that successful boutiques and individual lawyers already do – by contributing substantive content on a discrete subject area, linking to relevant industry news from credible sources, and showing a human side to the firm and its lawyers.

Social media has moved past the “fad” stage – it’s here to stay.  That being the case, it’s time more firms start putting it to work – the kind of real, specific, in-the-trenches work that happens every day at the practice group level.

Linkedin is the most common starting point for most lawyers when it comes to social media.  In recognition of that, I want to showcase a few features of Linkedin that you may not currently be using.

Status Updates

The status update box has been around for some time now but it is relatively underutilized in the legal community.  You can find the status update box either beside or directly underneath your photo on your linkedin home page or your “edit my profile” page.  It is a simple white text box that you can update as frequently as desired with a small snippet of information that you think the people in your network might be interested in.  That could be a link to an article or blog post you’ve written, news of an upcoming seminar you will be presenting at or attending, or just drawing attention to a noteworthy article or decision in your client industry or practice area.  Whenever you update your status, the homepage of everyone in your network gets alerted, which makes it an effective tool for keeping yourself on the radar of those in your network.

Company Pages

Most of us think of Linkedin as being built around individuals, but more recently Linkedin has wisely let businesses in on the action by creating “company pages” – essentially a Linkedin profile for the company.   But more than just a single page, the company profile can in fact serve more like a corporate microsite.  The “home page” of a Linkedin company profile is relatively fixed in terms of content and layout – you can include a brief corporate overview, as well as feeds of company blog and twitter accounts.  Linkedin also automatically includes summaries of some of the individual linkedin bios of your staff on this page.

Beyond that corporate home page, however, you can also create a “products/services” section that is a real hidden gem that very few law firms are currently using. You can create service pages for each practice area of your firm that includes:

• a picture or photograph;
• a service description;
• a bulleted list of key benefits or people;
• practice-specific contact information;
• a practice-specific web-link (e.g. a practice area blog or firm website section);
• an embedded YouTube video; and
• a disclaimer of your choosing.

Additionally, on your services index page you can also include up to three large banner ad-style images that themselves can link directly out to whatever you like.  This is ideally suited to highlighting key areas of focus for your firm.  Linkedin also has built-in analytics for these company pages so that page administrators can monitor traffic to these pages.

See an example of a law firm LinkedIn services section here.  (Full disclosure: this firm is a client).  Interested in creating a company page for your firm? This is a good place to start.

Follow Company

A corollary of the fact that you can now create company pages on Linkedin is that you can now choose to follow (monitor) the activities of other companies there as well.  This is similar to adding a person to your linkedin network, except that unlike the case with people, you do not require a company’s consent in order to follow their company linkedin activity.   Start looking for companies you already interact with regularly (i.e. clients, vendors, competitors, etc.) by simply using the search box in the top right hand corner of the top navigation bar, and using the dropdown filter to select “companies”) and typing in the company name.  Once you’ve found a company of interest, simply hit the “Follow Company” button, near the top right hand corner of the Company Page, and any updates they make will automatically appear on your Linkedin homepage that shows all recent activity from people and companies in your network.

InMaps

InMaps is a nice feature for visual learners that analyses your Linkedin network and creates a personalized visual representation (I’ve attached mine below as an example) of the people in your network and clusters them into as many as eight different groups based on the connections between them, each denoted by a different color.  It’s then up to you to identify what each of those clusters represent, and add your own descriptions to the legend in the bottom left corner. It’s an interesting exercise – in my case I found the strength of my law firm alumni network (Faskens) stronger than expected more than a decade on after leaving the firm.  I also noted an actionable insight in the relative absence of Linkedin connections in my network to the broader marketing and advertising industry – my current ties are much stronger to my client industry (law) than to the advertising and marketing world.

You can find out more and create your own InMap here:  http://inmaps.linkedinlabs.com/faq

There are a variety of other recent developments on the LinkedIn front that also warrant a further look, including LinkedIn Signal and the Legal Updates application.

The video (click on the image below to watch it on youtube) captures a high-speed rendition of a professional illustrator’s handiwork using simple pen and ink sketches to illustrate key themes being discussed as a Torys’ partner provides a no-nonsense narration on the audio track.  Because the expectation in a corporate law context is that we are going to see the traditional talking heads approach, the use of illustration and the high-speed effect create an element of visual interest that’s often lacking in legal video (and there is a particularly nice touch bringing it all together at the end).   Using a real partner on the audio track also gives it an authenticity that it would otherwise lack with a professional voiceover .   At a full 2 and a half minutes it’s perhaps a touch longer than might be ideal, but beyond that small nit I’d say this one’s a winner.  I hope more firms will look for fresh approaches like this as video takes firmer hold in the legal marketing landscape.

Lawyers frequently lament to me that they wish they could focus on the practice of law, rather than being perpetually barraged with new and un-billable marketing and technology demands. There is a palpable longing for the halcyon days when such a pure life was allegedly attainable. The fundamental approach to marketing in the golden age — still deeply rooted in many lawyers’ DNA — was “Do good work.”

Full-stop. Put another way, the prevailing ethos was “by one’s expertise shall ye be known.” Smart lawyers excelled. Smart lawyers who also happened to have a way with people were superstars.

Against this backdrop, any activity specifically directed towards marketing felt ancillary, somewhat impure, and utterly accretive, like barnacles attaching themselves to the underbelly of the mighty vessel that is the law. Given a choice between steering the ship or attending to barnacle management, most lawyers naturally gravitated above-decks to the wheelhouse.

Those of a certain age will remember that one of Dr. Leonard (“Bones”) McCoy’s most oft-quoted phrases on the original Star Trek series ran something along the lines of:“Dammit Jim, I’m a doctor, not a magician!” uttered in an exasperated tone when the good doctor was being asked to do the impossible for the umpteenth time. I can almost hear McCoy shouting at me: “Dammit Doug, I’m a lawyer, not a marketer!” when having a “law vs. these new distractions” discussion with lawyers.

For those who feel similarly under siege by the ongoing assault on their ability to actually practice law in the course of their legal career, I offer what I hope is at least a modicum of good news: a shift is occurring in marketing circles – and in this “New” Marketing, expertise is once again moving squarely to the forefront.

At a recent Legal Marketing Association conference in Toronto on the changing face of legal marketing, I was struck by the comments of keynote speaker Mitch Joel. In Joel’s view, the steak-less sizzle of traditional marketing is being usurped by something more substantive online. His position is that digital channels are the first places in marketing that facilitate real interactions between real people. As Joel himself put it:

”I’m thrilled to be out of a world where marketing is whiter, brighter, and 20% off.”

There is no question that the online world increasingly reins supreme from a legal marketing perspective. And in this new environment, the object that now shines brightest for lawyers “shilling their wares” is good old-fashioned expertise.

Perhaps the most obvious example of this shift is the rise of legal blogging. We have seen blogs definitively hit the legal mainstream over the last few years. Fundamentally, law blogs are online demonstrations of the author(s) legal knowledge, rich in detail and practical information about niche areas of practice. Frequently they are also geared to specific client industries, and can become important industry connection points as a result, acting as a sort of online commons (Slaw itself being a prime example of this in my view). The best blogs also tend to reveal something of their authors’ personalities, making the blogs more engaging for readers, and their authors analogous to the legal superstars of old.

But it’s not just blogs. Digital channels such as twitter and other social media have exploded in popularity in both the legal world and the broader population. The growth of legal document portal JD Supra is another case in point. In the legal context at least, it is substance over style that is winning converts – and clients – in these new arenas. There is an authenticity to digital marketing done well that is perfectly aligned with lawyers’ natural inclinations.

Recently I have been speaking with lawyers about the concept of transparency. In a marketing context, this means finding ways to make the knowledge that you have, and the legal thinking that you are already doing, more readily visible to the outside world. It involves using the new media tools that are now available to show interested audiences the nuts and bolts of what you know, what you do, and what you think, rather than being something separate and apart that is awkwardly appended to your practice after the fact, like the barnacle-laden firm brochures of old.

For lawyers, the challenge now lies in incorporating at least some of these new digital tools into the fabric of your regular workday in a minimally invasive way. If the classic lawyer marketing mantra was “Do good work”, then the “New Marketing” approach can perhaps best be described as “Do good work – visibly.”

For many, this pendulum swing in marketing focus towards showcasing legal expertise represents a welcome step back to the future.

I am arriving late to the party with my 2010 Clawbie nominations, but wanted to add my voice to the choir nonetheless.

First and foremost amongst my reasons for doing so is to take the opportunity to extend a very heartfelt and public thank you to both Steve Matthews and Jordan Furlong of Stem Legal, who have spent many hours crafting, organizing and judging the Clawbies for several years now.  Because the Clawbies are their baby and they are the judges, they will not be winning any Clawbies themselves, but in any parallel universe where they were not the organizers, you can rest assured that both the Stem Legal Strategy Blog and Jordan’s Law 21 would be multiple award winners.  Both blogs are an indispensable part of my online reading and I recommend them to you unreservedly.

With that, I turn to the business at hand – my picks this year:

1. Dye & Durham’s BC Law Watch Blog (and twitter feed)

Dye & Durham is a well-known entity in the BC legal market providing a wide array of legal support services to the profession, and their BC Law Watch blog and twitter feed are wonderful examples to me of where good marketing is going in the years ahead.  Rather than using these tools as a blatant self-promotion exercise, Dye & Durham has chosen to focus on their audience’s needs, by aggregating a wide variety of BC practice-related news announcements, bulletins, event notices etc. from the courts, law schools, courthouse libraries, and other relevant sources in one place.  It’s an incredibly helpful information feed in my opinion, it aligns very well with the company’s role in the market, it’s easy on the eyes with extensive use of graphics in blog posts, and it elevates the brand by educating me rather than selling to me.  All good.

2. Garry J. Wise’s Wise Law Blog (and twitter feed)

I had the opportunity to meet Garry in person during a recent business trip to Toronto at a beer for bloggers event and was left with a very positive impression of the man.  That led me to take a closer look at his blog upon my return, and blog posts like this have only confirmed my initial instincts.  A practitioner’s blog done right, it showcases how blogs can be successfully used by solos and small firms to bring a personal touch to the practice of law that the big firms are not structurally suited to match.

3.  Friend of the North: Kevin O’Keefe’s Real Lawyers Have Blogs (and twitter feed)

In addition to visiting our fair country on a regular basis to speak on blogging, social media and technology to Canadian lawyers, Kevin’s company Lexblog has also developed a fair number of the blogs on behalf of larger Canadian firms.  A former trial lawyer, Kevin is an innovator and an educator, and his blog provides valuable insight on where technology trends for the profession are heading next.  He walks the walk, talks the talk, and is worth the read.

There you have it – three that made a difference for me in 2010.  Good luck to all the finalists – the bar keeps getting higher every year which only benefits us all.  Have a safe and happy new year’s everyone!

Themed as “The Changing Face of Legal Marketing”  (click the logo above for the conference program and details) the morning sessions are focused around social media with two highly recognized speakers, Mitch Joel and Adrian Dayton, while the afternoon is a diverse looking multi-track program including PR, managing RFPs, creating innovative client experiences and more.

Skunkworks is very pleased to be participating as a sponsor of morning coffee (an area of particular expertise as those who know me personally can attest).  I hope to see you there.

Five years ago, law firm web strategy for most firms I encountered consisted of the following statement:  “Yes, we have a website”.  If a firm could check that box, most felt they had done their duty and could get back to the more important work of practicing law.  No longer.

The last half-decade has seen us move from a prevailing standard of mere existence online to a new framework where the firm website now forms the backbone of many firms’ marketing efforts, irrespective of firm size. Looking ahead, I see increasing emphasis on three broad areas: content, conversations and search engine visibility.

The Evidence Is In

The growing importance of the online environment for the legal world has paralleled its ascendance in other industries (see: music, news and more recently book publishing as examples of the larger trend). Additionally, a body of evidence has accumulated specific to law that supports shifting priorities towards a web-dominant marketing focus.  See, for example, a recent research survey on corporate counsel new media engagement from Greentarget Strategic Communications or Greenfield Belser’s Digital Marketing 2010 for detailed insights on what sophisticated purchasers of legal services are now doing online.

Deepening

With the landscape rapidly evolving, we have seen a maturation of what constitutes a “good” law firm website. Matt Homan of Lexthink LLC gently satirized both law firm websites and lawyer bios recently with a pair of venn diagrams that underscores a common weakness of the genre – sites and bios built for what lawyers think they should be rather than what clients are actually seeking. That led to an excellent reply from Robert Ambrogi on The Art and Science of Lawyer Bios in which he refines Homan’s critique by asserting that much of the “standard” bio information (law school attended, Martindale-Hubbell ratings, etc.) that Homan impugns is in fact still relevant to clients. Ambrogi asserts that the real sin with lawyer bios is that they lack personality, life, vibrancy and interest.  Both Homan’s diagrams and Ambrogi’s blog post have been well circulated online and the lively discussion about them evidences a growing awareness of the importance of lawyer bios and a sincere interest in improving them.

More sophisticated strategies are also emerging amongst the most engaged firms towards website analytics and search engine optimization. Slaw’s own Steve Matthews recently provided a detailed post on tactics for search engine optimization on a practice group level. This sort of granularity and detailed behind-the-scenes work on specific key elements of the firm website is not yet the norm, but it’s where we are headed.

Splintering

Additionally, many firms are extending their visibility and online reach beyond their websites. Some of the more common vehicles to achieve this now include:

• Blogs;
• Listservs;
• Gated online legal communities (think Legal OnRamp or Martindale-Hubbell’s Connected)
• Document portals (JDSupra)
• Video (Youtube); and
• Social media sites (chiefly Linkedin, Twitter and Facebook).

A small handful of firms have also launched iPhone apps, and more are expected soon. Many other firms are wrestling with just how many and which of these “extras” are worth their while. It’s an important question, and one that is not amenable to glib or one-size-fits-all answers.

Now What?

So where does that leave you today in terms of priorities, and where things are heading? Despite the web’s growing complexity, I believe the path to success for lawyers online is ultimately growing at least clear, if not easy.  In my view, firms can position themselves for online success by thinking about the web in three parts:

1. Content
2. Conversations
3. Search

Content: More than ever, content is king. Saying you are leaders in a certain area or type of practice is no longer sufficient. Clients now want to see it for themselves, first-hand in the form of direct links to your judgments, articles, blog posts, case studies, peer-review rankings and other validating source material. You must demonstrate that you have done exactly the kind of work they need doing, that you’ve done it for clients in their industry, and that you are eager to help them solve their issues. The type of empty prose that made anonymous law firm an all-too-successful caricature of the genre a few years back is going to wane in favour of a more transparent approach to surfacing the real work product and personalities of your firm. This is the deepening component, and much of it will, or should, reside primarily on firm-controlled web properties including the firm website and blogs.

Conversations: While firm websites are critical, it is also becoming clear that they are no longer sufficient in and of themselves, for the simple reason that they are largely structured as one-way communication vehicles – the firm broadcasts information and clients (hopefully) consume it.  However, a significant amount of your target audience’s time online is spent in places other than your website – on social networks, on industry portals, on listservs and blogs.  The common element is that these are communities where dialogue and multi-party communication takes place. Your lawyers need to go and meet the clients where they are online, be involved in these conversations, adding value, putting a human face on the firm, generating visibility and demonstrating an awareness of and involvement in the issues relevant to your client’s industry. Where appropriate, you can then use these channels to guide interested parties back to the relevant original content you have available on your own web properties. This is the realm of social media, blogs and gated online legal communities. This kind of engagement also typically leads to increased speaking opportunities and interview requests in relevant trade press. The specifics of which channels you use and how many of them your firm participates in will be decided on a firm-by-firm basis, but the need to engage on some level is a reality that more and more firms will be addressing in the near future.

Search: Search visibility has not been prioritized for many mid-sized and large firms in the past, but it is gaining traction. While firms would love – and frequently ask for – a magic bullet solution that immediately lands them atop the Google results for any and all possible search terms, the reality is that attending to the content and conversation mandates outlined above will be the best first path to improved search rankings for most firms.  Targeted, in the trenches work of the kind outlined in Steve Matthews’ SEO for practice groups piece can then be effectively used to extend search visibility even further, but it is extremely difficult to build significant search engine presence when there’s no “there” there.  Good search results have their foundation in deep content and multiple inbound links to your sites from a variety of third-party web properties that search engines recognize as credible and relevant to your industry.

To summarize then: Provide substance. Take it to where your clients are. Then seek to make sure others like them can see it too.  Plus ça change. . .

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.