Everything you do as a lawyer, and everything your stuff does for you and your clients, go on to shape your brand. It goes without saying that doing things well is key to building a brand. However, it is important to understand just doing your job well doesn’t build a brand.
A strong brand in today’s time is something that is worth talking about. Remarkable is the key to building noticeable, powerful, and in today’s social media communication world, viral.
Strongly negative brands are also built in this way. Unlike in the 90s, a lawyer can go from well respected to a villain, thanks to a single social media post about something remarkable he did or did not do, and either create or destroy his brand, and as a smaller subset of the brand, the reputation he as a lawyer may have taken years to build.
Apart from the positive and negative sides that come with every work a lawyer does, and every case a law firm handles, what are the things that you can do to build a powerful brand?
HERE ARE THE 9 THINGS TO DO AND MEASURE TO CREATE A POWERFUL BRAND.
#1 Thought Leadership
You may have great expertise in an area of law, but nobody really knows. Maybe the few colleagues who worked with you in the case, maybe the opposing counsel and your boss. Yes, it is possible for word of mouth to take on from there and spread, but it’s a remote possibility in most cases.
Thought leadership is the cornerstone of brand building for lawyers. Law is an intellectual pursuit. If you are known as an expert, as an original thinker, as someone pushing the boundaries of law, it increases your credibility by leaps and bounds, within the legal profession as well as among outsiders. What people say about you is your brand. If people say that you are at the forefront of a movement or a cause, that is probably the best thing that can happen to your practice.
You don’t become a thought leader by knowing all the law that is there, but by saying something new and disrupting. You do it by taking sides, picking up a cause, making a point, or maybe by arguing for an underdog who deserves your defence. If you are a thought leader, you will have to stand out and speak up. You are unlikely to make everyone happy – quite the contrary in fact. You will likely disturb some interests and make some people very unhappy. However, there will be people in your corner too, people who identify with you and support you.
If you are a thought leader, you are championing ideas whose time has come. Or maybe the time hasn’t come yet, but people like you are ready to stand behind it, vocally, visibly, even if it puts you at some risk.
Lawyers are naturally positioned to be thought leaders because it is their job to defend the weak and the vulnerable in the society, to stand up for rights of citizens and to represent those who need it the most.
I am tempted to use the example of Apar Gupta here, who is now a very well known lawyer in Delhi, especially the Supreme Court. Apar has always spearheaded legal activism with respect to civil rights – and played a role in a number of major cases, from striking down Section 66A of the IT Act, misuse of criminal defamation provisions in IPC to right to privacy debate. He has devoted a lot of his time and effort to causes that doesn’t really pay him as other clients may, but he is always fighting one or the other such battle.
This has not only led to his visibility in the legal fraternity and before the bench but a lot of media attention. He was frequently approached for his quotes by journalists as he is a regular commentator on upcoming legal issues in his blog. He was also mentioned in the Forbes 30 under 30 most influential Indians list a few years back.
That is a great example of how a lawyer can emerge as a thought leader.
#2 Sharpen your public profiles
Building a brand is an endeavour in the public domain. It very much depends on your touch points with the public. Where do they find you? Where do people interact with you and get information about you? Mediums like Twitter and Linkedin are definitely very important in the post-digitization world. So is what people see when they google your name.
It is a good idea to have a personal website, in your own name if you are a solo lawyer, or a law firm website. It should be a hub of legal knowledge and source of legal insights. This was done very successfully and exclusively by young and bright lawyers for a while, but the benefits of doing this are so obvious that almost all large law firms have started to pay attention to their blogs. Take a look at the Nisith Desai website for example. It is a law firm with an amazing website that is full of insightful articles. When you google on something you are researching on or looking for something that is important to you and you land up on an article published by a Nisith Desai Associates lawyer and get swayed by the arguments presented, it definitely impacts how you perceive that brand of the law firm.
Please audit your personal brand on LinkedIn, your potential clients are all checking you out over there.
Remember, your blog is your profile too. It shows off your best ideas and expressions. The comments on those posts show that people care and they bother to respond to what you have to say. It goes a long way in the brand building. It is a really good idea to have your blog, podcast or youtube channel for this reason.
How do you get tons of followers? It is very easy. Don’t bother with anything else. Just keep posting high-quality content on your page and it will happen. Don’t waste time with anything else. You don’t need to do “social media marketing”. It is never going to work for 95% people. It works like fire if you only keep publishing fabulous content on your profile.
Remember that it takes time to build amazing profiles. Someone who has been building a youtube channel or a blog for the last 10 years is likely to have the traction that you cannot build in next two years. However, if you keep posting amazing content over the next 5 years, who knows what is possible?
#3 Write a newsletter
How do you keep in touch with your professional contacts, admirers, former clients and potential leads, and even your peers? How do you ensure that people who matter actually hear about what you have to say when it matters? If you want to build a brand, creating your own newsletter is a very powerful step which is very rarely used in the legal industry.
A good newsletter is sent out at regular intervals, with news, insights and useful information that people do not want to miss out on. Starting a newsletter is simple and almost free until you get thousands of people subscribing to it.
Remember, that a newsletter is not spam, nor should you use it to spam people. Give them what they want and value it, not the sales pitch. You can put in a line of the sales pitch here and there, but what you send out must be very valuable as a whole.
At iPleaders, we can get an idea out to over 50,000 people through our newsletters, followers on social media and our communities at any given time. This is an amazing power that you must cultivate over the years if you want to build a powerful brand.
Where will people subscribe to your newsletter? You must make it easy for them. Insert subscription forms in your website, and your blog definitely. You can also have a separate newsletter for clients or add them to your general newsletter.
What you write on your newsletter should be delivered by email. However, reuse the content and share them on your social media pages, and also post the content on your blog.
#4 Contribute to discussions and debates
It is not enough to be seen on your own profile. A very big part of brand building is to contribute to others. Write for influential blogs and websites. Contribute to books other authors are writing. Engage with influencers and other thought leaders. Contribute your two penny to raging online debates. Participate in volunteer driven projects, do pro bono work, help someone to organize a conference or find the right speaker. Give a talk for no charges. Teach in the local law college. Take in some interns and contribute to their growth. Mentors young lawyers who can benefit from your experience.
The idea is that if you engage and contribute where you have nothing to gain, and do so consistently over the years with a lot of people, they talk about you in a certain way. It is a very powerful way to build a long term, sustainable brand.
#5 Pay attention to customer service
How are your customers treated when they show up with an unreasonable request you cannot honour? How long do they have to wait before their mail is answered? Do they feel that they are valued and that you appreciate the opportunity to do business with them? Do they feel lucky to land you as their law firm/lawyer? How does your secretary greet when people call? Do you show up on time for meetings? Where do they wait while they wait to be shown into your office?
Apart from the quality of the legal representation they receive, and whether you win the day for them or not, these small things go a long way in how people perceive you. Paying attention to these will determine what sort of brand you end up having.
How customers will be treated once they contact you is something that needs to be designed. This was how McDonald’s, which pioneered the revolutionary idea of fastfood was born. A movie called “The Founders” shows this process at it’s best in this scene. When McDonald’s was born, the founders took all the workers to a tennis court, where they drew up the restaurant kitchen with chalks and kept rehearsing each part of the cooking process and how all the people will work together and how they will move around in the kitchen, just like a symphony. They Kept doing this till they could make a burger within 30 seconds.
If you are building a brand for your law firm, or solo practice and have some staff (no well oiled solo practice is really solo, there are people working for you even if they are not lawyers), you can take a leaf out of the book of McDonald’s and rehearse each part of how customers are addressed and treated.
You can do the same for the services your offer. What are your top services? How do you get the work done? How many people plays any role, however insignificant in it? What are the moving parts? Where is the uncertainty? Plan it and rehearse it like McDonald’s.
After all, for a lawyer, the service itself is the biggest part of customer service. However, you can’t afford to ignore the smaller details even when you are delivering the big results. That’s what a brand is.
#6 Creating a network of influencers
It is very important to know the right people, and it is even more important that they know you and have good things to say about you. This is a cornerstone of brand building. In today’s marketing parlance, this is called influencer marketing. If you have small and big influencers in your industry associating with you and saying positive things about you, your brand will go through the roof.
Given the advancement of social media, it has become easier than ever to connect with influencers. However, the ancient alternative of meeting people over coffee is also an excellent idea.
The first step is to provide value to them. You cannot start by asking for favours or expect an influencer to promote you. However, you should be on the lookout – how can YOU contribute to them? Is there a way you can help out? If yes, do it. Don’t worry about the returns. ALso, don’t focus on too few people. Do it for a number of influencers.
Here is one example. Tim Ferriss, known as the master of self promotion, one of the most sought after influencers in the world and author of multiple NYT bestseller books, started creating his network by offering to help with organizing conferences. It gave him an opportunity to meet many influencers and an opening to interact with them one-on-one. Also, the organizers owed him. You can never have too many favours in the bank.
One excellent way to add value is to connect one influencer with another that he needs to connect with, at the time when he needs it.
#7 Acquire high quality affiliations
Why do doctors have so many degrees and certificates mentioned under their name on the door? It works. Your credibility goes up when you have the right affiliations. That is why people attend famous universities, have short stints with big law firms or celebrity lawyers. This is why lawyers take up standing counsel positions for the government or join ministry panels that may pay them much lesser than their standard fee.
You should keep an eye on how you can acquire high quality affiliations. Is there a way you can represent a well known organization even do pro bono work? Can you join nonprofit boards? Why don’t you keep acquiring new academic qualifications once in a few years, even though you don’t really need them, but just as a signal to the world that you care about keeping yourself up-to-date? It has become extremely easy with advent of online education, and you should take full advantage of this. Check out these courses offered by one of India’s best known law schools.
See if you can cobble together the stuff you have written over the years and get it published by a respectable publisher. Even if the book doesn’t sell, buy it with your own money and gift it to your best clients and those that you want to be your best clients. Gift it to the best law libraries in town! That is how affiliation works.
When you get high profile clients, and deliver them what they wanted, make sure you don’t forget to request them for a positive review – on your website, or maybe your facebook page, or LinkedIn, whatever may be appropriate.
Finally, whatever you do, don’t forget to measure. How do you measure? Keep a tally and it should be regular. Keep checking how many people read your newsletter, how many visitors come to your blog, how many customers left behind a positive feedback. Whatever gets measured, gets managed.
Reference-
- Ipleaders
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