eDiscovery Daily Blog
Marketing a Litigation Support / eDiscovery Department within a Law Firm: Introduction
You may have seen the movie “Field of Dreams”. In that film, Ray – the main character – builds a baseball field on his farm in Iowa. Famous, deceased baseball players like Shoeless Joe Jackson appear to play ball on the field, and fans travel from all over to watch the ball games. Throughout the movie, a voice tells Ray “If you build it, they will come”.
If you look this film up in a movie directory, it’s categorized as a “fantasy”. And this statement – “If you build it, they will come” – is a fantasy too. This just doesn’t work in real life. We have to do more than build something:
- We have to let people know about it,
- We have to convince people that it’s something that want or something that they need, and
- We need to continuously remind people about it.
This is certainly the case for law firm litigation support / eDiscovery departments. These departments offer invaluable services to law firm litigators. They make litigators more effective and more efficient. All too often though, these departments are underutilized because lawyers don’t recognize opportunities to use the services. I’ve worked with some departments that have been hugely successful in providing services, and with others that have been less so. There are several “keys to success”, but one very significant, common key I’ve seen in each successful department has been good marketing within the firm.
In this blog series (which will run over the next several weeks), we’re going to cover marketing techniques that work in a law firm. Specifically, we’ll cover:
- The Marketing Mind-Set,
- Getting New Customers, and
- Keeping Existing 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.