Copyright © 2019 Genevieve Burnett & Sally King

ISBN: 978-1-925846-57-7 (eBook)
Published by Vivid Publishing
P.O. Box 948, Fremantle Western Australia 6959
www.vividpublishing.com.au

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Contents

Foreword

1: The trouble with law firm marketing

2: Law firm structure

So, you’re a marketer and you’ve just landed a role in a law firm

Most law firms are partnerships

The managing partner

The partners

The lawyers: the fee earners

The non-professionals: the fee burners

The exception to the rule: C-Suite officers

Can adopting an alternative business structure (ABS) transform a law firm’s culture?

How can you develop powerful marketing campaigns if you’re working for a partnership that is based on a rigid hierarchy?

3: Law firm culture

The decision-making process in law firms can be slow

Law firms stifle dissent and reward conformity

Law firms often nurture a bullying culture

Law firms and mental health

The generational division in law firms

Silents or traditionalists

Baby boomers

Gen X

Millennials (Gen Y)

The generational divide makes marketing a law firm even more of a challenge

How can you overcome the challenges associated with working in such a conservative and fragmented workplace culture?

4: Meet the lawyers

The dinosaur

The laser beam

The legal salesperson

The rock star

The introverted professional

The lawyer who is about to be deleted

How should you approach working with different types of lawyers?

5: How lawyers think

Lawyers don’t necessarily make good leaders

Lawyers like to manage by objectives

Many lawyers are perfectionists

Lawyers don’t like non-billable work

Lawyers are risk averse

Lawyers are intellectual piranhas

Lawyers don’t like change

Lawyers don’t like talking about marketing

Lawyers don’t like mumbo jumbo

Lawyers think they are wordsmiths

Lawyers are suspicious of people who don’t understand legal concepts

Lawyers have a duty of confidentiality to their clients

Lawyers often struggle when it comes to implementation

Lawyers don’t like to ask for help

Lawyers appreciate high-quality work (especially if they think it may lead to a large number of clients walking through the door)

6: How lawyers see marketing

The trouble with the word ‘marketing’

Marketers and lawyers speak different languages

Marketers and lawyers value different skill sets

Lawyers don’t understand the work that marketers and business development professionals undertake

What is expected of the marketing and business development roles in law firms?

Coordinator

Manager

Director

Other marketing and business development roles

The importance of educating lawyers about marketing

7: A few concluding words

Acknowledgements

About the authors

Genevieve Burnett

Sally King

Notes and references

Foreword

This book promises marketing professionals that it will help them:

• gain a better understanding of both law firms and lawyers
• think about their firm, their relationship with the lawyers they work with and how they can build better working relationships with them
• work with the lawyers in their firm to create marketing and business development campaigns that deliver concrete results.

The authors have delivered on these promises.

Sometimes when a client poses an insoluble problem, I have said ‘I wish I had a magic button to push that would solve it for you’. For marketing professionals within law firms, this book is the ‘magic button’.

This work by Genevieve and Sally exemplifies synergy. Together, they demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of both law firms and law firm marketing professionals and how the two might interact in a better world.

If being a marketing professional in a law firm were a game, then, reading this book would be called cheating because by reading it the marketing professional’s chance of winning would rise meteorically.

Thank you, Genevieve and Sally, for providing this remarkable resource that I may share with all of the marketing professionals who seek guidance from me as to how they might enhance their credibility within their law firms.

Managing partners and their teams would also learn valuable lessons from this precise reflection of the current state of law firm leadership.

Two imperatives: buy this book and read it.

Gerald A Riskin
Founder
Edge International: a global consultancy to the legal profession