Q. of the Day: How do you brand a law firm?

Answer: The same way you brand anything else -- by assigning and supporting the qualities you want the public, prospects, clients, partners and employees to associate with whole, above and beyond the qualities that are associated with individual people and specific events and elements of the firm.

One decent definition of "brand" is "corporate personality." So, the question becomes, what is the personality of your firm? What is it that sets you apart from other firms when you all get together to practice law? In many cases, for many firms, the answer is, sadly... nothin'.

Many firms have no rhyme or reason for their joining together beyond sharing office space and copiers. And that, frankly, makes a lousy personality. The truth of that brand could be summed up as follows:    

Smith and Jones: We're convenient for us.

Doesn't that ring true for many firms you know of?

You can't "build" a brand out of nothing. You can, though, decide to market a brand, and change a culture to fit that marketing image, but it must be based on real qualities.

Is branding appropriate to "the profession?"

I once had a discussion with an attorney friend of mine who said that law firms couldn't be branded because advertising wasn't appropriate to the profession. I responded by telling him that advertising was in no way necessary for the promotion of brand. He asked me how I'd propose to brand a firm without advertising. I told him that a brand can be thought of as a consistent metaphor or personality that you choose to strengthen through your actions in order to build up an association that you hope will have a positive economic effect. He wanted an example.

"OK," I said. "I would imagine that a good brand association for a patent defense firm to have would be aggressive.' You want your clients to think of you as being aggressive in the defense of their patents, right?" He agreed with me. I went on to tell him that an aggressive patent defense firm would, therefore, need to structure all its client-facing processes (and many internal ones, too) such that they embodied the kind of aggressive, forward-leaning personality that they wanted their clients to associate with their firm.

"For example," I asked, "When do you contact clients about bills being past due?" He said he thought it didn't matter. Of course it matters, I told him. If you're aggressive, you don't sit on bills. You call about them on day 31. Same with faxes. You call to see if they went through. What time does your office open for business? 8am at the latest. Maybe even 7am. Why? It's aggressive. You need at least two, maybe three people at your front desk. Nobody should ever have to wait to be seen in your lobby. Nobody waits on hold in your phone queue. You get it? Right. Aggressive. Not rude, not pushy, not mean. But, DAMN IT PEOPLE! We need to get this stuff taken care of RIGHT NOW! We don't wait for the problem to manifest, we nip it in the bud!

Now... if you're a family law practice, and you want a brand that says, "We're careful, we're delicate, we're sensitive to the emotional nature of these matters and we want to help you get through them with as little pain as possible," you're going to do all the above things much, much differently. And none of that has anything to do with advertising. Of course your ads will reflect the same kinds of differences. And though individual clients will have individual associations with individual lawyers and cases and days and offices and decisions, they will, over time, begin to build up a general feeling about "the firm." And why is this valuable? Because, presumably, the firm would like to keep their business if the client's lawyer retires, dies or goes to a competing firm. And if the only thing the client cared about was the personality of that one, specific lawyer... well, the firm is outta luck when that lawyer goes a-losty.

The law is complex, and complexity brands well

A group of human beings, all working together on enormously complex intellectual and social tasks have an infinitely EASIER chance (in my estimation) of establishing and leveraging a brand than does a company that makes a "thingy" of some kind. With cola, shoes or gasoline, you need to create a brand and graft it onto the product. You need to form an experience around the acts of shopping and buying, around events in which the product might be consumed or used, around famous people using the product. There is no inherent drama in a beverage. And, for most of us, no real drama in sneakers or gas. We may watch an NBA player dunk or a NASCAR driver race while using these products... but it's a vicarious thrill.

A law firm, on the other hand... when you use its service, you're in there, baby! Every matter, every case, involves multiple interactions, often with multiple people. And even if every lawyer on the planet, and every firm in the world had to do the same thing in every case -- if the "what" was the same -- the "how" can be incredibly different.

I once witnessed a group of lawyers all responding to a crisis in a case they were working on. Some major change had just hit them via a Blackberry message, and four of the five attorneys were in panic mode. They were all talking at once and trying to figure out who was going to call whom, do what, say what, find what, send what, etc. Pandemonium. The fifth lawyer sat there, calmly, and waited until they'd all had a chance to vent and steam for about five minutes. When it was clear that nothing was being accomplished, he simply stood up. In about five seconds, the room fell silent. Everyone looked at him, and he said, "I will take care of this. I'll call the client. I'll take full responsibility. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. Someone has to be the bearer of the bad news, and it might as well be me. I'll let you know what the result is."

He left the table, and there was complete silence for about a half a minute, and then we pretty much broke up and went about our separate business.

What was the "brand" being communicated in that closed room? By one of the lawyers, it was calmness, responsibility, decisiveness and strength of character. By the other four? I don't know... maybe chowder-headedness. They weren't all associates, and he wasn't the senior-most partner at the table, either.

Brand is about the long-haul

If your firm stresses -- from birth to grave -- the importance of certain values over others, that will be its brand. Ross made the point very well; a firm can be practical, speedy, tough or nice. It can't be everything to everyone. You can't be Jimmy Stewart and James Dean. You can't be the sweet, hometown girl and the vamp. It's not that one is better than the other, but that they are different, serve to identify you to clients that are looking for a match with how they do business, and are a way to signal that "we want THIS kind of business, but not THAT kind." I think that one of the reasons so many lawyers get frustrated with their jobs is that they take any work that comes in through the doors. That's just foolish. I don't do work for just anybody out there. It would make me nuts to work for certain kinds of companies and firms. It would take an enormous wad of money, for example, for me to do packaged goods marketing. It's an incredibly tough and cut-throat marketing world with tiny margins and a track-record of broken bodies. The guys that do it are heroes and work like mad and I don't want to be them.

WHAT you do is your job. HOW you do it is your brand. If your secretary answers the phone, that points one way. If you answer your own phone, that points another. If calls go to voice-mail, that's a third. If the phone rings and rings and rings... that's a fourth. A bad fourth, but a fourth.

All brand advertising should do is reinforce what your brand already is. Unless you are a shoe or a can of sugar water. Then you may need advertising to create the whole thing from scratch.

I hear all the time, "But the law is different." Of course law is different. Everything is different. Jeans are different than law. But jeans are also different than cars, which are different than airlines, politicians, rock bands, chewing gum, mail-order brides, overnight delivery services, house painters, tattoo parlors and dentists. But law isn't fundamentally different than everything.

People want to do business based on various factors. And those factors change depending on the product or service being offered, and the circumstances, and careful attention to those factors can increase the likelihood that people will choose your product or service, and choose it again and again or cast you off after one use.

Branding tells a story and adds value

I know of no other industry where practitioners have such casual disregard for the customers of their service that they insist that any one of millions of licensed professionals, or any one of thousands of groupings of attorneys could perform the work adequately well. I know McDonald's franchise managers who have more esprit du corps than many law firm managing partners, and who do more to instill pride of place in their workers.

The law is, in fact, a noble profession. It is a demanding profession. Done well, it requires sacrifice, patience and determination. It is not an easy row to hoe. Many kids go into it thinking that it's a guaranteed route to a six-figure income only to find out that the guarantee comes with lots of fine print. I have tremendous respect for 97% of the lawyers I know, find many of them to be among the smartest and funniest people I know, encounter more community giving from law firms than many other companies and institutions and can't for the life of me figure out why lawyers keep making life harder for themselves than it has to be by ignoring basic business principles that work everywhere else.

Branding works. Period. Whether you back it up with advertising or not is almost a moot point. If you identify a set of characteristics that your clients value, and others that they don't, and you train (and compensate) your associates from Day 1 to exhibit the valuable ones and shun the execrable ones, you will build a well branded firm.

But you can't just say that those qualities are things like "timeliness" and "tradition" and "adherence to ethics." Those aren't brand-able qualities in law. They are the price of entry. That would be like a jeans company advertising that "Our pants have two legs!" Or Disney advertising that "We have rides!" Remember... brand is about HOW, not WHAT. But a certain amount of HOW is required as part of the basic "We're not idiots" package. Branding your law firm as "Functionally literate and able to chew gum and walk at the same time," wouldn't be so hot, would it? So saying that you return calls, are ethical, have respect for traditions, and... ack, gag, barf... all that other clap... doesn't cut it from a brand standpoint.

Why do I love Disney? It's clean. Cleaner'n heck. That's part of its charm. And it ain't overly loud. They don't pipe in raucous music from every lamp-post. There's crowd noise and kid noise and ride noise, sure. But they don't add to the hullabaloo with 3,000 decibel cranked-up hokum tunes. They sure do at other parks, and I hate it. Clean and not as noisy. Those are parts of Disney's brand. They are attributes that fit well with lots of other Disney points.

So... if you want to get whatever work walks in the door, and whatever work your individual lawyers can scare up, and whatever work you'll get because you're the biggest "whatchamacallit" firm in the Greater Bee-Baw Metropolitan Area... fine. That's the way it's been happening for a couple hundred years. But if you would like to be able to sustain a price premium in the face of increased competition, or have clients who are loyal even when attorneys leave the firm, or have law students clamoring to get into your firm even though you don't offer $5K more than the firm next door... work on a brand.

There's a reason people pay more for well-branded products. And there's a reason they'll pay more for a well-branded firm. Brand isn't just about the sizzle. It's about all the things that help you identify a better steak.

Comments

[Traverse Legal, PLC]

I agree that branding does not necessarily mean marketing. Branding has as many internal benefits as external. By building an identify, you focus your mission. When everyone on your team understands and internalizes the mission, clients get better service (assuming of course your mission is related to client service).