It usually take a good three weeks to develop a good impromptu speech—Mark Twain

An opportune way to allow newer attorneys to cut their teeth in an industry is to develop opportunities for them to participate in speaking engagements. Under the guidance of more senior members of the firm, they can receive good exposure with current and potential clients. Use the law firm marketing department to research professional conferences in which to sponsor or participate one to two years in advance. Here’s why it is essential to the marketing mix: The more speaking engagements and seminars you conduct and participate in, the more opportunities your attorneys have to make contact with new targets and new possibilities to enter the Red Zone.

Turn Seminars into ‘Web’inars

Don’t just record the events on camera for prosperity. Arrange in advance for the rights to use the footage from the seminar, trade show or association event for future use on the firm’s website to broadcast the helpful information worldwide. Doing so will enhance the richness of content and credibility of your corporate site. Opportunities for exposure abound on the Internet, both from a client relations and potential media relations opportunities, as reporters covering a particular area of law increasingly use the net to find sources on the subjects they cover. As an extra measure of exposure, email a link to the seminar to existing and potential targets along with a brief note.

This is the final chapter on law firm mergers and the importance of early involvement by marketing leadership. What can you do to maximize the “rollout” which begins in earnest after the “launch” is over? It needs to identify what the marketplace really wants, and it delivers it.

The launch is a press release. The rollout is the real meat and potatoes of merger marketing. It requires an in-depth knowledge of your own resources in terms of people and expertise. Those resources can be tough enough to identify at your own firm.

In a merger, it requires an assiduous cataloging of what the two firms bring to the table. It should confirm the wisdom of the merger.

In this third chapter on law firm mergers and the importance of early involvement of marketing leadership, the next question is:

How do you show - not tell - the marketplace that your intellectual and professional platform is indeed broader and deeper? New sub-specializations can be defined and marketed. Articles on legal or client industry issues should be co-bylined by lawyers from both merging firms. Talk about mergers in general, using your own as one example. Even years later, partners from the two original firms can still share their experiences at conferences, meetings, etc. - and by so doing implicitly remind the market that their own experience is an example of how it is done right.

This is the second in our series on Law Firm Mergers and the importance of integrating the marketing leadership from both firms as early in the process as possible. Since clients and internal stakeholders will be the most impacted, how should a firm get more people to care?

Well, what do people care about? While marketing in a merger situation is not conceptually unique, it is exponentially more complicated because now you must refine the message and re-identify the messengers across multiple fronts. These fronts encompass the capabilities of the merging firms and the altogether new capabilities that the merged firm presents.

With this premise set, our next column will focus on how you show - not tell - the marketplace that your intellectual and professional platform is indeed broader and deeper.

A vital component to business generation and business development is to create an effective follow up plan. Good follow up enables your firm to fully capitalize on the opportunities that develop relationships already available to you via bar association and trade events, meetings and seminars.

Remember, good follow up starts even before you make physical contact with your target.

Preparation: The Huddle

• Organize the follow up before the event, ascertaining who your firm’s primary targets are.
• Preview handout materials and anticipate who might be attending.
• Match the right attorney with the right potential client based on practice area and expertise.

Then, Don’t Drop the Ball:

• With every personal connection you have made at the event, organize a follow up system to maximize the good will you have cultivated. Forget email in this situation. Instead, stay at the top of their minds with a personal, hand-written note sent no later than three days after the meeting.
• Conduct a post-event review of attendees, their titles, industries and buying power. Then create a checklist on how to effectively follow up on each viable lead.

We begin a new series on why most underachieving law firm mergers share one fundamental deficiency. Over the next several columns, I’ll identify a checklist to be used by the negotiating partners and marketing leadership to deal with it.

The failure is to work a practicable marketing strategy into the very soul of the merger - before it happens, while it happens and after it happens. Keep in mind that marketing is not just self-promotional activity but the process by which the institution actually defines itself. It is also used by others, such as in recruitment and business development to define the firm externally. Marketing likewise has an immediate impact on internal perceptions.

The first of the strategic questions from both firms’ marketing leadership should include:

1. Who is going to care about the merger? The answer, of course, is anyone directly affected by it, mainly clients and internal stakeholders. So marketing leadership must provide for direct and well-timed outreach to both constituencies, by phone whenever appropriate.

Stay tuned for more.

allan