This time, our law firm marketing friends across CEE considered the following question: “What one part of your job would you most appreciate having more help with – not in terms of training or capability, but simply in terms of time?”
Formatting. Working with lawyers and particularly litigators can often make your life miserable as they spot formatting mistakes from across the room. For a creative marketeer focusing or worrying about formatting is the last thing you want to be doing.
Charlotte McCrudden, Independent Law Firm Marketing and Business Development Consultant, Istanbul.
Having a constant flow of trivial but often urgent tasks (such as proposals, tenders, and submissions), I do feel a lack of time for more strategic things. This is why I would appreciate having more help with enhancing our legal experience database.
I strongly believe that the transactional background of the firm is one of its core values. Therefore, it would be helpful to have more time for our legal experience management – systematically add new matters, create more detailed and sophisticated descriptions for new and existing matters, track the progress of our work and reflect it in project descriptions, issue subsequent press releases, prepare related descriptions for legal rankings, and advertise our main achievements. The smart management of the legal experience (which requires a lot of time!) is necessary to produce instant and quality proposals and simplify legal directories management.
Olga Bezverkha, Marketing Manager, Redcliffe Partners.
I find important that law firms do not just invest into qualified people but also in sophisticated IT systems. In general, many law firms focus on how lawyers should do their work more efficiently, but my experience is that very few law firms pay the same attention to back office systems – even though, if in place, they can lead to large gains in efficiency.
Everyone who has ever worked in a support role in a law firm knows that it is not just lawyers’ work where there is room for optimization in the organization. Students, assistants, Human Resources, Marketing, we are all in the same group, which often receives feedback on mistakes in first drafts of documents, or comments about the long time it takes to send “a simple list of the names and mailing lists.” But when you are using tons of excel spreadsheets to create billions of cells which no one except you can understand, instead of using one efficient system, it is hard – often impossible – to do your work on time and without mistakes. We could be here all day long and it wouldn’t be enough.
“You don’t have to discover America,” as we say in the Czech Republic. There are plenty of systems which are tailored for law firms, focusing exactly on what we need. You can’t expect miracles from people if you won’t give them the tools they need. It’s the same as wanting a lawyer to deliver a due diligence project but giving him just a pencil with broken graphite and greasy paper and telling him that whenever he needs to search paragraphs he has to visit a library which is kilometers away. You wouldn’t do that, right? So why do lawyers think that we are magicians? We all just want to execute our tasks perfectly.
Libuse Hasincova, Marketing & Business Development Specialist, Glatzova & Co.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with various yearly and quarterly reporting on deals closed and mandates won. Submission forms for various law firm directories keep growing in number of pages and type of info requested; deal of the year awards keep popping up, bringing along their own forms and criteria; the entire process is becoming completely time and energy consuming. What was once the best part of my job is becoming the most dreaded time of the year
Jelena Bosnjak, Business Development & Marketing Manager, CMS Croatia.
It’s events and legal directories (last minute changes and technical issues, I would say).
Oksana Buchatska, Marketing and Business Development Manager, DLA Piper Ukraine.
If I had more time, I would love to seek more inspirations for our law firm in terms of the selection of gadgets and other marketing materials, venues for conferences, etc. Also, I would like to spend more time on the improvement of our internal communication and I would like to organize more team building activities.
Daniela Otto-Ziarkowska, PR, Marketing & Business Development Specialist, Jara Drapala & Partners
This Article was originally published in Issue 6.6 of the CEE Legal Matters Magazine. If you would like to receive a hard copy of the magazine, you can subscribe here.
