: Genevieve Burnett, Sally King
: The Marketer's Guide to Law Firms How to Build Bridges Between Fee Earners and Fee Burners in Your Firm
: Vivid Publishing
: 9781925846577
: 1
: CHF 10.50
:
: Recht
: English
: 200
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Are you a marketer or business development professional who works in a law firm and finds it difficult to get projects off the ground? Are you frustrated by your firm's slow decision-making process? Do you find the lawyers you work with to be both risk averse and resistant to change? Are you concerned that many of them perceive the marketing team as ineffective and unresponsive? Or are you a marketer who has just landed your first job in a law firm? Do you feel you've entered an unfamiliar world defined by hierarchy, as well as a rigid binary distinction between fee earners and fee burners? If so, 'The Marketer's Guide to Law Firms: how to build bridges between fee earners and fee burners in your firm' is a must-read book. In this insightful and succinct analysis, Dr Genevieve Burnett and Sally King demonstrate that the primary reason law firms struggle with marketing is because, in most of them (whether in New York or Sydney), there is a fundamental problem with the relationship between lawyers and marketers. What causes this gap? Why is this relationship so often dysfunctional? By taking you on a journey through the structure and culture of law firms, as well as the different way lawyers and marketers think, this book will help you understand what makes both lawyers and their firms tick. Most importantly, it will give you the analytical framework to build more productive relationships with lawyers, so you can work together to create marketing and business development campaigns that deliver concrete results.

2: Law firm structure

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

If you’re a marketer or business development professional who has just accepted a job in a law firm, you may feel like you have arrived in an unfamiliar world. If so, don’t be alarmed, because you’re not alone. We’re pretty sure that just about every non-lawyer who has ever entered a law firm has felt the same way.

Interestingly, this feeling of inhabiting an alien world will probably apply whether you’ve accepted this new role in London, New York, Toronto or Sydney.

This is because, unless you’ve arrived in a funky NewLaw firm that aims to change the way law is practised and has embraced a flat business structure where everyone is equal, you will find yourself living in a world defined by hierarchy and a rigid binary distinction between fee earners and non-fee earners (sometimes referred to in firms as ‘fee burners’).

If your role as a marketer or business development professional involves implementing a digital marketing strategy, you may find yourself wondering how you’re going to do your job in this rather conservative environment.

To navigate the law firm you are working in, it will help if you understand how it is structured.

Most law firms are partnerships

Whether you are talking about the UK, the US or Australia, you will find that most law firms still use the business model they used 100 years ago – that is, a partnership. In the UK, most firms are limited liability partnerships but they still have the characteristics of a conventional partnership, especially in terms of how power is allocated and the way in which decisions are made.

A law firm partnership is unlike any other corporate structure. We believe the best way to grasp it is to think back to the medieval period, because most law firm partnerships have characteristics that could be described as feudal. By this, we mean that legal partnerships are structured like a pyramid and the people who work within this structure have a very clearly defined status, based on their role within the organisation.

The managing partner

In a legal partnership, the managing partner is the king or queen and sits at the top of the law firm pyramid.

As a marketer working in a law firm, you need to realise that this is a tough gig for a number of reasons. First, many lawyers who end up in managing partner roles have no training in management, leadership or finance. Instead, the reputation that has catapulted them into this role is based on their skills as a practising lawyer. Second, a managing partner never knows when their fellow partners may decide to replace them. A managing partner doesn’t get to keep partners at a distance in the same way that a CEO or a chair of a board of a large, publicly listed company can keep shareholders at a distance. Instead, partners sit in the business and watch every move the managing partner makes.

At the same time, power is not necessarily evenly distributed among the partners in a law firm. For example, you may encounter a firm where power is centralised around senior management and the managing partner. You may even come across a situation where the managing partner is widely despised by the partnership but, to your surprise, you also discover that if the managing partner is on board with an idea, it will be implemented.

On the whole, however, managing partners are under constant pressure to keep their fellow partners happy. This usually means ensuring a never-ending supply of gold coins flows into their pockets. It isn’t an unreasonable demand. After all, most partners have f