Just a quick pointer to this article found on the New York Times most e-mailed articles list in case you missed it: Who’s Cuddly Now? Law Firms. It covers trends in flex-time, the billable hour, and work/lifestyle at law firms large and small.
Lisa Van Der Pool of the Boston Business Journal adds to the discussion of law firm naming and branding with this article in the January 11-17, 2008 issue: The legal name game. Says the article, “brand awareness is a top concern for any company going through a merger, but for law firms that merge, coming up with an acceptable moniker can be particularly tricky.”
It reveals some of the thinking and ego-checking that went on behind the scenes in the naming of WilmerHale and K&L Gates — two law firms using short “street” names for branding purposes, while retaining the longer, official name. The outcome is evidence that marketers are making headway in the area of traditionally difficult-to-brand and multiple name law firm entities. Witness:
K&L Gates for Kirpatrick & Lockhart Preston Gates Ellis LLP
WilmerHale for Wilmer Cutler Pickering Hale and Dorr LLP
See previous posts/articles on this topic:
With all the talk about social networks, law firm marketers and attorneys are wondering, “Should I have a MySpace page?” Such was a flurry of activity on the Legal Marketing Association List-serv this past week where most legal marketers poo-pooed sites like Facebook and MySpace as they were mostly for ‘kids’, but opined that perhaps Linkedin might be useful as it has a more ‘business crowd.’ Currently, I’m not an active user of these systems (as blogging is my drug of choice), and I don’t expect that lawyers and law firms will start jumping in in droves, simply because as an industry they tend to be new-technology-adverse (see earlier post Lawyers Slow to Embrace Blogs ABA Survey Says).
However, and this is a huge however, I do believe that social networks can and will be an important part of internet life and business going forward and we should all become more familiar with them. Law students and young lawyers and marketers are already using them, so the train is coming. (Whether social networks remain distinct services or integrate themselves into our holistic web experience is another question to ponder.) Sure, there are the potential horror stories when folks sign up for and use technology that they don’t really fully understand.
Since law firm clients are just now starting to ask seriously about the benefits of blogging, I don’t predict a fast adoption of social networks by this same crowd. But if you want to be on the leading edge, now is the time to dip your toe into the social network waters and at least learn and evaluate. And if you see a way to use a new technology as a way to differentiate your brand, leverage your content, or improve and increase releationships and awareness — I say, go for it!
There has been plenty written on the subject of social networking including Kevin O’Keefe’s Social Networking Sites: Will they work for lawyers and other professionals?
Here are some others…
MySpace Helps Attorneys Find Clients
Linked in or Left Out: ‘Supercharge’ Your Interactions Through Social Networking
Online Social Networking for Lawyers — Online Networking for Fun and Profit
I’d love to hear others’ views and experiences on the topic. Please feel free to comment.
I received an e-mail from Patrick McKenna, a long-time professional services consultant with Edge International, kindly informing me of his most recent blog post (dated December 30, 2007) titled, The ABA, Shamefully Does Not Practice Diversity. In it he criticizes the December issue of the ABA Journal for its cover story, “The Blawg 100: The Best Web Sites By Lawyers.”
States McKenna,
“I cannot believe the shameful audacity of the ABA Journal to rate web sites for lawyers . . . by including only those written by lawyers. For those who long suspected that the legal profession, unique amongst professions for categorizing people as either being lawyers or non-lawyers, really doesn’t understand or support diversity, you now have the proof.”
He provides several examples of excellent blogs for lawyers written by non-lawyers including those by:
Then just yesterday, I read a very interesting article in the New York Times that offers an explanation as to how this type of isolated thinking happens. In Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike, Janet Rae-Dupree, describes this phenomenon as a “curse of knowledge.”
“…once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.”
The article offers anecdotal and scientific support for bringing people with different skill sets — even (gasp) outsiders — to the table. It also introduces a groovy, new bit of jargon you can toss around — “zero-gravity thinkers.” Click here to read the full article on nytimes.com — it’s worth the 5 minutes.
