Returning from the Marketing Partner Forum in Miami last week, I realized that one of the biggest changes during my law-firm sales tenure has been the effects of 9.11.

The terrorist attacks on the United States occurred just three weeks into my new job at Womble Carlyle.  I was using the time to restore (and leverage) contacts with some of the business executives that I had met during my preceding 16 years of sales work at accounting firms.  I distinctly remember that on the morning of 9.11.2001, I was on the phone with the CFO of a large DC-based conglomerate. As our conversation progressed, I gradually became aware of an eerie change to the symphony of the city.  Normal street noises were replaced with sirens, care horns blaring, helicopters, and even fighter jets buzzing the city at low altitude.  Shortly after I finished the conversation with my CFO contact, I learned the dreadful reality:  One of the New York World Trade Center towers had collapsed, and there had been bombings somewhere in DC, perhaps the Mall.” 

The attacks of 9.11 brought legal sales to a standstill.  No one wanted to meet or to discuss legal needs.  The nation wanted to mourn and perhaps to exact retribution.  What a way to start a new job!

In reality, within three or four months, the conduct of business began to normalize to some extent, and I was able to undertake the activities that have characterized my tenure as one of the profession’s first sales executives – initiating and following-up on meetings with clients and prospective clients.

Lest we forget, however, 9.11 has left a permanent imprint on legal sales and marketing.  Prior to 9.11, travel was manageable and at times pleasurable.  No more.  New regulations and restrictions have rendered business travel a nightmare.  Those of us who sell and buy legal services still travel as necessary, but we certainly have found other ways to conduct business, including more meetings utilizing phone, video and web conferences.  The diminution of person-to-person sales meetings is an unfortunate, but understandable, effect of 9.11.

September 11 also led directly to one, and indirectly to one or more major armed conflicts costing tens of billions of dollars.  These armed conflicts have, in turn, fomented political and economic instability in the U.S. and around the globe.  In the aftermath of 9.11, and certainly at least partially as a result of it, we have experienced two significant global economic traumas, and we are still mired in the second one nearly four years after its advent.  We are much more suspicious of one another than we were prior to 9.11, and we have learned how to operate in a business and social environment of continually looking over our shoulders.

On the legal front, 9.11 led to the generation and adoption of significant new legislation, regulation and business practices related to individual rights, criminal defense, privacy, data protection, multinational relations, government contracting, lobbying and more.   Ever opportunistic, law firms have responded by creating discrete services that address post-9.11 realities.  September 11 also resulted in significant re-thinking of building security, and in locales such as Washington D.C., where I operate, government offices and government-contractor buildings for years have been fortifying and/or relocating, creating not only real-estate law opportunities but also a new wave of traffic and logistical nightmares.

On a strictly personal front, I would guess that the aftermath of 9.11 has reduced my airplane business travel by 50%, and it has increased my weekly commuting time by 2 hours over what it was a decade ago.  I would guess that 9.11 has directly or indirectly increased the number of Womble Carlyle web pages by 20 or more, as new lawyer groups have formed to address new needs related to Base Realignment and  Closure, Privacy and Data Protection, cross-border tech transfer, government contractors with boots on the ground overseas, and more.

Ten years have muddied the memory of 9.11, and we don’t often tally the effect on law firms of the 9.11 terrorist attacks. But upon reflection, 9.11 forever changed the legal sales and marketing profession, and it certainly merits a place among the Top 10 developments in the last decade of legal sales and marketing.

 If you know of other effects on legal sales and marketing of the 9.11 attacks, please let me know. 

Right now, I’m preparing for a presentation at the 19^th Annual Marketing Partner Forum, a presentation with Jim Stapleton, Silvia Hodges and Adam Severson titled “Building Reporting:  Marketing and Business Development Metrics.”  And, I’m realizing that a subject that was once rarely discussed has become one of the hottest topics in law firm sales and marketing circles.  In 2001, law firm marketers talked about how many brochures they produced, articles they placed, organizations they sponsored, lawyers they got into directories, and how many Client CLE events they planned and staged.  In 2012, law firm marketers are talking a whole new lingo:  number of leads in the pipeline as the result of an event, what percentage of those leads become clients, how much revenue does each average new client represent, what is the dollar equivalent of earned media placements, how many click-throughs result from a blog post, and on and on and on. 

Doing a little search-engine searching on the topic, I can find virtually nothing on the search term “Law Firm Marketing Return on Investment 2001.”  Searching on the term “Law Firm Marketing Return on Investment” without specifying a date yields page after page of articles, blog posts and commentary – most of it written within the last year.  The September 2011 issue of “Strategies:  the Journal of Legal Marketing” is dedicated solely to managing with key performance indicators, another way of labeling ROI. 

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the discussion of Marketing ROI seems to have really heated up in 2008, about the time of the financial meltdown.  Which law firm sales or marketing professional did not start feeling the heat at that time to justify his or her existence, as the owners of law firms started to focus as never before on the impact of law firm operations on their wallets?  And, as they started to legitimately question:  what’s working and what’s not?  And how many law firm sales or marketing professionals who could not justify his or her existence are still in the field with us today? 

Prepping  for the Marketing Partner Forum has reminded me of another of the Top 10 changes I’ve observed over my decade or so in the legal world:  Measuring Return on Investment, and being able not simply to list one’s actions and activities but being able to quantify and prove the value of one’s work and one’s recommendations.  There’s quite a bit less net under the law firm sales and marketing high wire than there was 10 years ago.

Yes, I know that some sort of clerical error led to the letter noting my “selection by my peers” as a Best Lawyer, and we all make mistakes.  My point is not to cast aspersions on Best Lawyers, but rather to point out the larger development — that over the last decade we all have witnessed an escalation of the lawyer-ranking industry, and that it all may have very little meaning.  On the whole, lawyers are competitive and achievement-driven people, and they are deadly earnest about being included on virtually any imaginable competitive list.  Consequently, law firm sales and marketing departments are drawn ever more into the tedious business of a) helping lawyers get listed and ranked or b) explaining again and again at considerable professional risk that directories and lists are the  least productive of the many channels available to gain professional recognition and win new business.  BTI Consulting’s considerable 2010 research into Rankings and Ratings for Law Firms spells this all out with great clarity.  I continually supplement my understanding of BTI’s results with one-on-one first-hand discussions with buyers of legal service, who uniformly confirm BTI’s findings.  Another disclaimer here:  rankings and ratings may have utility in attracting lateral candidates; I have no knowledge of their utility in that arena. I contend only that they virtually are useless in pursuing new business. 

Despite the low sales productivity of ratings-and-rankings activity, many ultracompetitive lawyers insist that their sales and marketing departments invest time and treasure in the effort.  Some marketing departments even have hired individuals whose full-time (or nearly full-time) job is to handle lawyer rankings.  The rest of us deal with it on a catch-as-catch can basis, probably adding up to at least one FTE per department.  While many lawyers do not understand the low sales productivity of such pursuits, it is conventional wisdom in the legal marketing community:  Witness a now-viral spoof by Allen Matkins’s CMO Adam Stock of a fictional encounter between an earnest marketing professional prescribing productive business development activity….and a lawyer focused on ratings.

As my friend Mark Maraia points out, when it comes to law firm sales, Relationships Are Everything – still!  The only way I can see to counteract the siren song of ratings and directories is to use the more-productive channels to help lawyers initiate so many new relationships, build them over time, and monetize them that rankings and ratings disappear in a cloud of dust.  We’re not there yet, by a long shot.

After entering the field of legal sales and marketing in 2001, I, at first, attended a few of the standard gatherings of legal marketers; there were few if any legal sales professionals then.  Frankly, I found the discussions hard to abide, as many law firm marketers came off basically as junior versions of the lawyers for whom they worked, chastising the notion of “nonlawyers” interfacing with clients and prospective clients and driving results.  Blanching at the word “sales.”  Locked into convention and coloring within the lines.

And so, at the time, when I went looking for guidance and inspiration, I turned to gatherings of sales and marketing leaders from other segments such as consulting, advertising and technology.  These meetings were a bit more “out there” than were the legal marketing meetings I attended, and the attendees were clearly leading and willing their organizations to greatness and not all that worried about professional propriety.

I’ve spent more time again the last couple of years at gatherings of legal marketing – and now, sales – professionals.  How things have changed!  The field is now densely populated with a higher level of professional, many of them joining law firms after highly productive stints in other industries.  They are bringing their experience, their leadership, their creativity and their willingness to take big risks to do what the legal profession has lacked.  They challenge conventional wisdom.  They do not wait for lawyers – who just don’t, as a rule, have the aptitude for or training in sales and marketing – to lead.  These new creative forces in legal sales and marketing are influential change agents with deep experience, ideas, emotional intelligence and fresh perspectives. Today, when I attend gatherings of legal sales and marketing professionals, I am inspired by them, and I invariably depart with a bucket full of new ideas and insights.  And I LOVE it that there are other grenade-throwers in attendance.  This is a huge change over what I perceived a decade ago. 

So, at 10 years and counting, my hat is off to law firms’ new and emerging sales and marketing leaders!  We’re getting there.

Other commentators know much better than I the facts about social media – number of worldwide social media users, commercial organizations’ increasing share of commerce through these channels, etc.

My own take on social media is that it is a low-cost solution to a challenge that – at least until social media exploded onto the scene five or so years ago — has long plagued law firm marketing departments:  Should marketing investment be in the law firm’s brand, as a generality, or, rather, in promoting individual lawyers?  In an environment of limited marketing funds, it is difficult if not impossible to do both simultaneously.  Choosing to focus on an investment in the brand creates institutional awareness, clearly an important element of the traditional buying cycle (awareness, interest, assessment, decision).  But it does not adequately support lawyers in their efforts to initiate and build relationships; I always have asserted that relationships, whether directly or via reference, are the foundation of legal services sales.  On the other hand, choosing to focus on the promotion of individual lawyers erodes the reach and impact of institutional branding. 

In this environment, five or so years ago, social media arrived, and as social media has matured, it has become clear that it is a tool that directly addresses the marketing needs of individual lawyers at a very low out-of-pocket cost.  With social media, lawyers can digitally create networks with clients and potential clients that rather easily can be transformed into face-to-face relationships.  With social media, lawyers easily can create distribution channels for their content; even in the context of 140 characters in a Tweet, a lawyer can attach a link to longer, more-thoughtful and more-substantive content.  A clear benefit to lawyers utilizing social media regularly is an enhanced search engine presence, and the concomitant increase in the odds of being found by buyers.   (Research conclusively shows that when buyers don’t have existing relationships, and when their colleagues can’t produce a referral, they next turn to search engines to locate potential providers). 

Law firm marketers have, to an impressive degree, adopted social media.  Many view it, as I do, as the next step in the unfolding of communications technology.  To some of us, it is a step as dramatic as the one that advanced us from hard-copy mail to electronic mail.  Individuals now in college and law school eschew traditional e-mail, preferring instead text and social media as the communications media of choice.  These students will soon be buyers, and they will expect their providers to be able to communicate with them in their preferred media.  For that reason alone, it is important for lawyers to embrace social media.

Beyond that, social media already is demonstrating its efficacy as a sales tool.  Some members of my sales team at Womble Carlyle regularly communicate with clients and prospective clients solely through social media, and yes, we have acquired new business as a result of this activity.  Just yesterday, Larry Bodine, editor in chief of Lawyers.com reported in a noteworthy article that 55% of marketers have closed new business via social media.  At this point, the percentage of lawyers who have done so surely is dramatically lower than that percentage.  Adrian Dayton, one of my most-trusted social media advisers, often uses a slide that demonstrates that lawyers are near the bottom of the pack among all professions in LinkedIn utilization; only farmers are less adept at LinkedIn than lawyers.  There is no reason to believe that they are more active in other social media such as Twitter and Facebook.

I don’t think that social media is for all lawyers.  But to me, it’s a shame that in an era when so many lawyers understand the importance of personal brand and work so hard in unproductive channels to build it, they do not avail themselves of one of the most striking and inexpensive law firm marketing developments of the past decade.  I fear that those who wait until the proof-of-concept is conclusive will have totally lost first-mover possibilities.

For all these reasons, I have decided to include in my list of Top 10 developments the advent of social media and the – thus far – tepid response to it from the outside legal community.

For my own amusement, as much as for the enlightenment of others, as my 10 year anniversary arrived, I began collecting thoughts about the state of the legal sales profession at age 10:   the most important changes, developments, successes, failings and trends.  Over the next few weeks, I’ll share them on the New Legal Normal Blog.

Power to the Buyer.

To me, far and away most important development of the last decade has been the assertion of power on the part of the buyers of legal services.  Over the last 10 years, the supply of private-practice lawyers has come to far outstrip the demand for legal services, complemented by the arrival of new technologies and providers other than law firms.  Inside of companies, C-suite executives have focused on controlling the legal spend, and in many instances they have deployed procurement specialists to re-engineer arrangements between buyers and sellers.   The manifestation of buyer power has many faces:  the Association of Corporate Counsel’s Value Challenge, Lean Six Sigma and other project management tools, innovative pricing, a focus on client delight, collaboration among law firms serving the same client, abandonment of many nickel-and-dime irritants, and a nascent humility on the part of outside counsel. 

Much work remains to be done.  Old habits die hard on both sides of the table.  Too many outside counsel still hope that recent developments are but a blip and that the changes thus far are sufficient.  Inside counsel could help ensure that improvement continues by being more courageous than they have been to date in “rewarding” with engagements the law firms that have adapted to the new normal and who really are innovating.   One segment of inside counsel in particular – the diverse segment – could play an even more powerful role in realizing their objectives by quantifying the size of the legal spend that they personally control.  I am sure it is multiple billions of dollars annually – a market that makes additional law-firm transformation economically, in addition to socially, feasible. 

In recent years, I often have heard the word “re-set.”  To me, the most-important re-set is the relationship of inside and outside counsel based on buyers’ newfound power and assertiveness, bearing the fruit of improved comity and productivity.  While there are plenty of strains in the legal business, I think we’re all getting along better these days.