eDiscovery Daily Blog
Marketing a Litigation Support / eDiscovery Department within a Law Firm: Getting New Customers, Part 2
Yesterday, we covered a couple of ‘big-picture’ marketing mechanisms and techniques that work well in a law firm. Here are a few more:
- Distribute a newsletter. A newsletter is a great way to keep your services in the minds of litigators in your firm. Many law firm litigation support professionals have told me that they would love to do a newsletter, but they don’t have the time. It doesn’t have to be all that time-consuming! Here are some tips for creating an effective newsletter that won’t take up too much of your time:
- Keep articles short and to the point. Attorneys won’t take the time to read long articles. If you do write a long article, break it up and publish it across multiple issues (just like I’m doing with this blog series!). If this is done well, your readers will look forward to your issues.
- Use a template with a few consistent sections. Have a section for “News and Announcements’, another for “Articles and Features”, another for “Client Highlights”. Make sure there’s a section for contact information for you and your staff.
- Maintain a list of “topic types” to include in your newsletter. Examples of “topic types” are “How to’s”, “Creative ways to use your services”, “New technology trends”, “Significant case rulings”, “Stories about people in the firm”, and so on.
- Ask others for articles. Vendors and consultants you work with would probably love to get their names in front of your litigators, so ask them for articles. Associates and paralegals in the firm may likewise want the exposure.
- Create a web site or get some pages on the firm’s internal web site. Consider these web pages:
- A page with descriptions of your services.
- A page with descriptions of the technology tools you make available.
- A page that describes your staff with bios and location/contact information.
- A page that describes the physical facilities you have, like training and review rooms.
- A page with testimonials from attorneys for whom you’ve done good work, and descriptions of success stories
- Find champions who have influence. One of the best marketing techniques you can employ is to get people with influence in the firm to market for you. Establish relationships with senior partners, department chairs, managing partners and rainmakers who support your department and have an interest in seeing you succeed.
Next week, we’ll cover a few more techniques and mechanisms for getting new customers. In the meantime, we’d really like your input on how you’ve approached marketing in your firm. How much marketing do you do, and what’s worked well for you? Please share any comments you might have or let us know if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.