Legal Marketing -- by Larry Bodine

I'm going to Tucson

To paraphrase the Johnny Cash song, "We've been talkin' 'bout Tucson, ever since the snow came out. I'm goin' to Tucson, I'm gonna work around winter.  Yeah, I'm goin' to Tucson, look out Tucson town."

When the sky gets dark, the snow comes down, the days get short, the closets get cold, ice forms on the street, the car must be warmed up, my skin gets dry and Christmas is over, it's time for me to relocate my office to Tucson.  It's the city that gets the most days of sunlight in the USA.

From January 1 to March 31 you can reach me at:

520.577.9759
4601 E. Camino Pimeria Alta
Tucson, Arizona 85718
My email address remains Lbodine@LawMarketing.com.

See the photo at right, which is the view from my office.  If you're in Tucson during the next three months, stop by and say hello.

Wolf Greenfield's Holiday Catalog of SNOW

I knew I was in for something good when I read on the envelope, "Here Comes Our Holiday Card!"  It was sent by Wolf Greenfield, a 56-lawyer intellectual property firm in Boston with a sense of humor.

Inside was a hilarious 4-page "SNOW Holiday Gift Catalog 2005."  It features:

• The Abominable snowman Patent Examiner Talking Doll.  "Press the briefcase and the doll shouts out "Patent granted!" "Don't you want to go broader?" and "I'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that prior art."
• A Get Ready for Winter Snowflake Watching Instrument, which is actually a magnifying glass.
• Name Your Own Snowflake! "What better way to show your loved ones how unique they are than to have a snowflake named for them!  The U.S. Snowflake Registry (U.S.S.R.) has kits to fit any budget."

And the hysterical kicker is the snowmobile mobile.  In the "special inventory sale" the mobile is offered "with a set of four snowmobiles, each weighing about 600 pounds, so caution should be used when hanging it."

The catalog has prompted excited utterances from clients, such as: "IT ARRIVED - the Wolf Greenfield Christmas card. And again it's great. I love it, my secretary loves it - we all love it. If there were no other reasons to do business with Wolf Greenfield, the Christmas card would be reason enough, just to be on the mailing list."

Mega-congratulations to Wolf Greenfield's resident marketing geniuses, Sally "only the cops call me 'Sara'" Crocker and Meghan Haggerty.

It's now Twin Cities Diversity in Practice

Twin Cities Diversity in Practice, a consortium of leading Minneapolis and St. Paul, MN, law firms and corporations dedicated to attracting, recruiting, advancing and retaining attorneys of color in the Twin Cities legal community, announced its official name change.

"The consortium wanted a name that better reflects the group's mission and objectives" said Seema Shah, Executive Director.  "We're excited about our new name.  We feel Twin Cities Diversity in Practice communicates our active commitment to enhancing diversity within our organizations and our community.  She can be reached at  (612) 977-8610 and sshah@briggs.com.

Twin Cities Diversity in Practice was formed as a collaboration between corporations and law firms in May 2005.  The group will son launch a Web site and plans to partner with local bar organizations on a variety of programming.

Awareness and interest in the group has grown steadily since the group was founded in May 2005.  The list of members of Twin Cities Diversity in Practice includes:

Law firms:

Bowman and Brooke LLP
Briggs and Morgan, P.A.
Dorsey & Whitney LLP
Faegre & Benson LLP
Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.
Gray Plant Mooty
Larson o King, LLP
Leonard, Street and Deinard
Lindquist & Vennum PLLP
Littler Mendelson P.C.
Merchant & Gould
Moss & Barnett
Rider Bennett, LLP
Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi L.L.P.
Zelle, Hofmann, Voelbel, Mason & Gette LLP

and corporations:

3M
Cargill, Inc.
Ecolab Inc.
General Mills, Inc.
Medtronic, Inc.
St. Paul Travelers Companies
Target Corporation
Wells Fargo & Company

More Law Firms Launching Blogs

There’s a nice roundup of which law firms are blogging on page 50 of the November/December issue of Law Firm Inc. (unfortunately it’s not online).  The article interviews the people behind five leading law firm blogs, and mentions a few others to boot:

• Davis Wright Tremaine: Privacy and Security Law Blog, interview with Associate Lance Koonce in New York.
• Holland & Hart: Health Care Law Blog, interview with Gregory Piche, Partner
• McGlinchy Stafford: CAFA Law Blog (Class Action Fairness Act), interview with Anthony Rollo, Partner
• Stark & Stark: The New Jersey Law Blog, interview with Richard DeLuca, Director of Business Development. The firm also publishes the Traumatic Brain Injury Law Blog.
• Preston Gates & Ellis, Electronic Discovery Law, interview with David Bowerman, Senior Business Development Manager  (for an in-depth story on this blog, read “How a Blog Changed the Way Preston Gates Communicates” online at http://www.pmforumusa.com/pages/magazine.asp?Action=DrawArticle&ArticleID=184.
• Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton, 6 blogs including the Antitrust Law blog.
• Kean Miller Hawthorn D’Armond, McCowan & Jarman, Louisiana State Law blog.
• McNees Wallace & Nurick, Pennsylvania Health Law blog.

These precedents can be persuasive with reluctant partners when you’re trying to get your firm to launch a blog.  According to Blawg.org there are 1,144 law firm or lawyer blogs in 199 categories.

Law Department Purchasing Consortium debuts

A group of major corporations has teamed up "to leverage the buying power of participating law departments to gain market advantages in purchasing services and products from law firms ," according to President Peter Jenkins.

"Before law firms think this is a squeeze play and get defensive, , the good news about the Law Department Purchasing Consortium is that the corporate counsel understand that they need the help of the law firms with which they do business to achieve their improved efficiency and cost-reduction goals," Jenkins said.

More than 35 law firms and suppliers confirmed in writing that they were willing to serve Consortium law departments as “Approved Providers.”  Among those who signed on are:

       Barnes & Thornburg                   ACT Litigation 
       Butler Rubin                                  Allegient Systems
       Eversheds                                      CaseShare Systems
       Fasken Martineau                       Courtroom Connect
       Finegan Henderson                    Digital Mandate
       Murtha Cullina                             Eastwood Stein Deposition Management
       O'Hagan, Smith & Amundsen     Integrity Interactive Corporation
       Seyfarth Shaw                               Legal Research Center
       Spencer Fane                               LT Online (LawTrac)
       Summit Law Group                     Six Sigma Academy

The Consortium is looking to identify “partnering-savvy” attorneys and suppliers who are committed to helping their corporate customers achieve their business goals through genuine, win-win collaborative arrangements, Jenkins said. 

The Consortium’s leaders are intent on helping participating law departments gain more value for their legal spend and cut costs, but not at the expense of their preferred outside counsel.

The consortium is the brainchild of Gary Cohen, General Counsel of The Finish Line, Inc. (past Chair of the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Small Law Department Committee and current member of ACC’s Board of Directors).

"With the recent launch of the Law Department Purchasing Consortium, partnering initiatives are no longer the domain of large organizations. The Consortium, guided by some of Corporate America’s top General Counsel, provides law department leaders from companies of all sizes with the resources and infrastructure to pool their buying power and implement cutting-edge management tools and technology," Cohen said.

The sole focus of this initiative is to leverage the buying power of participating law departments to gain market advantages in purchasing services from law firms and legal suppliers.  Charter participants in the Consortium now include, among others, law department leaders from:

       AT&T                                          Active Technologies
       Beaulieu Group                          Bemis Company
       Express Carriers                        Determined Productions
       Heineken USA                           Katy Industries
       LabCorp                                     LSG Sky Chefs
       NACCO Materials                      Motorola      
       Nestle’ North America                Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission
       Primerica Financial Services     Royal Bank of Canada
       Sony Corporation of America    TriMas Corporation      
       Westinghouse Electric Co.

“This is the tire-kicking stage.  Before opening the Consortium’s doors to law department participant registration nationwide, we want to make sure that the Consortium’s first-level deliverables and facilities are strongly in place,”  Jenkins said.

Jamming at IBM: Birth of a new marketing medium

Now there is a genuine way that law firms can get valid internal input when trying to:

• Define the firm’s brand.
• Pick new industries and companies to target.
• Create new services for clients to buy.
• Define what the firm’s values are.

IBM is using a new collaborative online medium to capture best practices, solve urgent company issues, get ideas to change company agendas, and explore the company’s values and beliefs.  It’s called “Jamming,” according to Michael Wing, Vice President of Strategic Communications at IBM’s Madison Avenue offices in Manhattan. AND it replaces knowledge management, which he said is a “30-year failure.”

Getting consensus is tough at a company with 175 locations and 369,000 employees.  It’s no easier at any size law firm.

Wing spoke at the recent Strategic Research Institute conference "Blogs and Social Networks." A Jam is a global online brainstorming event -- “a threaded discussion in a Web environment.”  Here’s how it works: an employee goes to the company intranet and clicks on the topic of the Jam.  Then they type in their thoughts in a message, using their real names. They have a 48 to 96-hour time period to make a comment, and then the Jam closes.  No comment is deleted, even negative ones or calls to unionize IBM.

To make sense of the thousands of messages, IBM uses eClassifier, JamAlyzer and SurfAid to sort them into topics, spot emerging patterns and put structure on all the comments.  Then they use the ideas to run the $96 billion company.

Here are some of the questions IBM posed to its entire workforce, and the results they got:

WorldJam (May 2001): Urgent IBM issues:

• 52,595 participants (unique users)
• 6,000+  ideas
• 268,000+ views of posted ideas

ManagerJam (July 2002): The changing workforce and the role of the manager

• 8,123 participants (unique users)
• 4,500 ideas
• Framed agenda for two-year program

ConsultantJam (Feb. 2003) - helped accelerate the acquisition of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC)

• 8,560 participants (unique users)
• 2,960 ideas

According to Wing:

A jam is not:

§         An announcement vehicle

§         A top-down communications tool

§         A community creator / definer: it’s a population, not a community

§         A personal soapbox

§         A chat room: no one is anonymous

A jam is:

§         Best-practice capture – an idea socialization vehicle

§         Global collaboration – find people you otherwise would never meet

§         Democratic –  equal access and freedom-of-action for all

§         Pragmatic –  participants rate actionable ideas and behaviors

§         Organizational research tool –  a population snapshot, a barometer of culture change

§         An event – an organizational intervention that begins and ends

Imagine the marketing and business development uses for a Jam at a law firm!  Look for an upcoming article on The LawMarketing Portal by Mike Wing on Jamming and how your firm can use it.

Hiring of Marketing Director makes the Home Page!

They certainly know how to treat marketers right -- in Scotland.  The law firm Tods Murray LLP announced on their home page that they hired Debbie Atkins as Director of Client Relations Management and Business Development.  What's even cooler is that she doesn't even start until January -- they announced it a month in advance.

See for yourself at http://www.todsmurray.com/.

Three cheers for Peter Misselbrook, Executive Partner, who said, "This appointment demonstrates our continuing commitment to improving services to clients, and strengthening connections in the market sectors in which we practice. I am delighted Debbie has agreed to join us; she will bring an abundance of experience and enthusiasm to help us succeed."

Richard Chaplin of London, founder of the PM Forum, said "I was very impressed that a leading marketing director in Scotland has made it onto her new firm’s home page in style a month before joining with a massive photo, comprehensive resume and a great quote from the CEO. Does anyone know of a law firm ever doing the same – or are we destined to remain unsung heroes for ever?"