The explosive growth of online social networking sites such as Facebook represents a marketing challenge and opportunity that law firms cannot afford to ignore. Rupert White reports


Whenever a women’s monthly magazine runs a piece on choosing the perfect partner, there will inevitably be a section on being out for dinner on a first date. One piece of advice will always be the same – watch how he treats the waiter, because that is a measure of how he will treat you.



This simple piece of advice is a mirror to the new world of relationship and brand management. Running a successful law firm is not just about business strategies and marketing plans. It is increasingly as much about law firm brand perception and word-of-mouth marketing – and this applies to a client looking for a firm that is ‘right’ for them as much as it applies to job seekers looking for the ‘right’ move. In the future, and not the long term, these two areas will increasingly overlap, and that is a marketing challenge and opportunity law firms have never faced.



Law firms have a problem with retention and it is not going away. They are also engaged in a battle for the best and brightest talent out there, from graduates to rainmakers at the top of their games. Brand perception in the buying market also affects firms in two other key ways. First, firms that foresee their markets becoming increasingly ‘commoditised’, whether they like this or not, are increasingly at risk from better-marketed firms – because brand is everything when products are all pretty much the same. Second, gaining the new business and keeping the old in the next few years will be about using every available marketing ‘channel’, something law firms are not currently so good at.



Fundamentally, clients want a relationship, and the future of marketing – and success – outside of press mentions and newsletters will be deeply connected to the new world of personal, online networks, because we judge our potential relationships by other relationships – that waiter/date scenario realised in business. Also, if your law firm treats trainees right, it is more likely to get people to work for it, and potential clients will always, if possible, ask how existing clients find a law firm’s service.



Until relatively recently, this gossip happened in comparative isolation. Trainees or summer interns griped about poor treatment, but only to their friends and others at their university, for example. Clients might make bad work public, but they were very unlikely to do so. That world has changed forever.



Industry analysis company Datamonitor estimated in October that global active memberships in social networking sites could reach 230 million people by the end of 2007, and that number will climb until 2012.



The business-focused social network LinkedIn has 14 million people as members worldwide, with over 200,000 members in what it calls the ‘law practice industry’ – 12,000 of those in the UK. Lawyers on the network, says Liz O’Donnell, director for international at LinkedIn, use the site for anything from maintaining relationships with clients and business associates, to increasing their visibility online and career advancement. It is debatable how many lawyers in the UK have found a new job on LinkedIn, but it is without doubt a sign of things to come.



Interconnected future

This interconnected, social networking future will, say commentators, create repercussions across the business world and indeed is already doing so. On the social networking website Facebook, there are more than ten groups linked to Allen & Overy (A&O), several with more than 100 members, none set up or maintained by the City giant. Most of them are for trainees and interns, but there is also one for ex-staffers. There are also Facebook groups called ‘I sold my soul to Freshfields for two weeks’ and ‘I sold my soul to Herbert Smith for two weeks’ for vacation tryouts.



This proliferation of firm-specific groups may have affected A&O’s recent, and since reversed, decision to ban staff from using Facebook. But the reason A&O should never have done that is the same reason it should be encouraging people to use it – because online networks are one of the primary places where people, both potential employees and potential clients, will in future find out about your firm.



The number of Facebook groups featuring law firms looks superficially like a brand disaster waiting to happen, because any chatter no longer happens in a vacuum. But it need not be, for precisely that reason. A law firm that treats staff well, be they there for two weeks or ten years, will get good coverage in the online society, and people who like what they see will want to work there. And they too will sell the firm.



This is marketing at an abstract, and it will be hard to see return on investment. But as an example: the primary members of the ‘I sold my soul to Freshfields’ ex-vacation intern group are listed to the side of the page – all 18 are from top-flight universities, with eight from Oxford and five from Cambridge. If an aspiring employee visits the page to see what being a Freshfields intern might be like, the impression is clear – the firm takes only the best. And most of the user comments on the ‘I sold my soul...’ groups are actually very positive – strangely, it is far from a ‘bad’ thing to say in this instance. They liked it and they want to work there. This brand enhancement has cost the law firm precisely nothing more than it would have spent on the interns already. Plus it gets it a free mention in this article, of course.



Online perception

‘Your firm’s online profile is important, not just in terms of building brand profile and influencing potential and current clients, but also in how your peers perceive the firm,’ explains Charlotte Tandy, an account director at PR firm Lansons Communications.



‘Where do most people search for information now? The Internet. Your firm’s online profile doesn’t just end with your web site. Comments on web sites like Rollonfriday or Facebook can have more sway, for example, with potential job candidates than anything written in a national newspaper,’ she says. Monitoring sites like these, therefore, should be standard practice. Managing them in some way might be next.



Illuminating alumni

So how does a law firm exploit all this new media technology, beyond understanding that what it does to people will become public very quickly?



Aptly, A&O has started to harness social networking technology to stay in contact with firm alumni, which helps maintain a relationship beyond employment. This, says Alex Pease, a former partner and now chairman of the alumni programme, will help in future business, future hires and brand perception.



At the moment, the alumni-only site, built by social networking technology company SelectMinds, allows former staff to make their own profiles and be given information when they wish – but they can also find and contact each other. The system does allow more social network functionality, says Mr Pease, but this is not yet being used by members. It will be, however. ‘I can see that it will be amazingly useful to have that kind of contact once you’ve left the firm,’ he explains.



Online networks ‘represent a huge opportunity’, he says. ‘If an alumnus leaves the firm and he still has that immediate contact with people who know about what he wants, he’s going to instruct A&O.’



The word of mouth: viral marketing world is already here on the Internet. Law firms in the UK are barely using this new set of channels at the moment – those that are stand out precisely because of their rarity value. But out there, on the web, the atomised world of individuals that makes up online ‘society’ talks to itself. Firms can and, experts say, must choose to engage with it.



Effective alumni social networks, for example, will work vastly better online than in traditional modes, and will give people a feeling of belonging and satisfy some of the ‘need to be needed’ their workplace provided. But the networks will also allow ex-employees to create and maintain relationships, which enhances their view of the law firm and, perhaps much more importantly, provides the firm with future possibilities.



An alumni-based network can be part-built by its users – just get users to ask others they met at the firm to join, using their social network to build yours. This is, after all, exactly how online social networks work: using user-generated content to fill the ever-expanding audience bubble they need to survive.



Olivia Cook, business development director at SelectMinds, says A&O’s alumni network is a rare UK example of something US firms are already striding ahead with. US firms also perhaps realise a key reason why such networks will be so important – a new way of looking at staff retention, and the future need to bring capable, expensively-trained women back into the business. Retention will increasingly come to mean a broken career over decades rather than the traditional model of a long uninterrupted tenure, and online social networks could play a key part in a law firm dealing with the expense of employee churn.



‘The US is several years ahead in terms of looking after alumni, forums, mentoring, and giving women a stronger voice and a better chance of returning to work,’ she says. It is vital to keep relationships going after women leave a firm, she adds, ‘even if it’s more of a mum’s network than a business network’, because ‘you still keep the channels open to knowledge workers whose knowledge you need’.



Facing regret

There is, of course, a downside to all this social networking. It is just as important for lawyers to be careful of what they say about themselves online, and even how they treat other people, as it is for firms to take care over their corporate images. Potential lawyers or established ones who engage in lots of colourful online ‘discourse’ or post images of their private lives are creating an alternate CV they may come to regret. Ms Cook, for example, says she is sure that recruiters are already looking at people’s profiles on sites such as LinkedIn as part of their research. Law firm HR departments cannot be far behind.



The upside is that recruiters will also inevitably use online social networks to find people. Nick Root of legal recruitment firm Taylor Root says recruiters are yet to grab social networking by the horns, although ‘lawyers are very accessible in terms of looking up information about them’, he says. But his team has heard of one medium-sized recruitment firm that asked candidate-hunters to trawl Facebook for old friends who might be looking for a new challenge.



Shared knowledge

Some other forms of social networking technology are also having an increasing effect on law firms, both within and without. Wikis, for example, get a lot of press and they are showing how useful they can be in terms of productivity. Not only is wiki technology, where documents are collaboratively created, intruding into knowledge management areas in law firms – with groups of lawyers contributing to a knowledge base freely – but it also could be used to produce the documents law firms create for the world. Several firms are working on wikis that allow groups of people to collaboratively write contracts, for example, potentially stepping away from Microsoft Word and the problem it can occasionally have coping with very large documents with thousands of tracked changes.



Finally, what about clients themselves? Well, first, surely it is only a matter of time before firms extend social network technology-based knowledge management and contract drafting, for example, out to in-house corporate counsel and beyond. This will be a big positive differentiator for law firms, especially those working with high-tech firms.



Second, it really is only a matter of time before there is a series of websites and services where clients can gripe anonymously about their current or ex-law firms, and rate them on their service. When this – an easily realisable version of the price-comparison website Moneysupermarket.com for law firms – comes about, firms will be right to be very worried indeed.

Perhaps this sounds unbelievable, or at least highly unlikely. Think again: in October this year, LexisNexis Martindale-Hubbell launched Client Review – with which ‘firm clients can complete anonymous online client reviews of the firms that have previously acted for them’.



LexisNexis’s view is this: there is a ‘genuine need among sophisticated buyers of legal services for an unbiased, third-party resource which aggregates anonymous client feedback’. Client Review, it says, ‘will provide additional data to help inside counsel and/or co-counsel quickly and confidently build law firm shortlists, corroborate personal recommendations, identify a firm in an unfamiliar jurisdiction or when no reliable personal recommendation exists and justify those decisions’. How’s that for online comparison shopping at the high end of legal business?



And how long before Client Review, or a competitor, gets opened up to all and sundry? Or, worse, one gets made by clients, for clients? Then firms will truly be in a position of hoping against hope, while they wait for their phones to ring, that they were very nice to the waiter indeed.



l For a different take on how technologies like social software can help law firms, download the Gazette’s Management and IT supplement from tinyurl.com/2o5ojf