Your Honor Awards: Winning!

During the judging this year, co-chairs of the Legal Marketing Association Your Honor Awards asked the panelists to indicate submissions that would be interesting case studies for a conference audience.

Wold Theiss‘s Janet Nordstrom is Chief Strategy Officer of a 325 lawyer firm spread over mostly Europe with services among many former USSR states, that won in training category. The lawyers had never had business development training. Brought in corporate counsel from multi-national firms and ACC to teach lawyers what would be necessary to compete for business among this universe.

Young lawyers were sponges, ready to learn. Took them to a remote site in Austria where they couldn’t leave or access communication and distraction. Wrote two very difficult case studies. Did day and half pre-training on how to create value for client. Empowered the lawyers to devise solutions to the case studies, which would be judged by the in-house counsel as if in an RFP situation. At the end, panel of corporate counsel gave deep details on how to forge relationships that develop work for a lawyer.

Andrea Wood of Leonard, Street covered her winning entry in the online category, the launch of Dodd-Frank.com. Just seven marketing staff, but a strong business development culture, enabled a team effort to focus on this time-sensitive time-intensive project. One attorney reserves the domain on June 27 and presented the name to the marketing department.

They knew they could leverage the name, so June 30 it was decided to implement a blog. The bill was signed on July 21, 2010 and this mean it was a rapidly expiring opportunity, needed to do development and support with PR and other marketing. Budget was not identified. Firm had no prior blogging experience. Attorney did have time to devote to the project.

Stockpiled posts for ten days prior to launch. Sought a lot of suggestions for low cost providers. Meanwhile, supported the attorney’s interest in his practice and took the project information to all other practice groups. Enlisted firm leadership, somewhat at their looking askance, but they trusted their business development team. Ultimately, eighteen lawyers were trained on blog writing and have posted nearly 300 pieces of information on the Dodd-Frank Act. Site launch was July 30.

Stephen Hastings of Fasken Martineau discussed firm’s Best in Show winning entry in marketing on a shoestring, a bespoke marketing tool built on SharePoint. Called Symphonie, it is a repository of marketing and branding tools that can be worked on and is systematized firm-wide. Fact sheets, bios, photos, events are easy to access and adapt. Everyone can see everything. Also built a social networks internal feature.