Making it rain | Maine law firms hire marketing staffers to drum up — and keep — business

Rand Ardell joined the law firm of Bernstein, Shur, Sawyer & Nelson a little over a month ago. The 35-year-old executive is no attorney, though, and his hiring marks a significant trend among the state's largest law firms. Ardell's title is marketing director, and he's one of the few director-level executives at the firm.

With the addition of Ardell, Bernstein Shur has pulled itself in line with the other big four firms in Portland ˆ— Pierce Atwood, Preti Flaherty Beliveau Pachios and Haley LLC, and Verrill Dana LLP ˆ— each of which now has a full-time, top-level director of marketing, all of whom have been hired in the past five years. This is the extension of a trend that has been growing for a couple of decades in the nation's large cities, and is finally beginning to take root in Maine.

"The larger Maine law firms are no different than the law firms in the other 49 states, and this is what's happening in those larger firms," says Preti Flaherty managing partner Harold Pachios, who had his marketing director, Lisa Meyer, in place before anyone else did at the big four. "I don't think there's a firm anywhere with more than 50 lawyers that hasn't moved in this direction."

Most of Maine's other firms are far smaller than that, and thus the phenomenon seems to be Portland-centric. Firms off the peninsula either don't do much to get the word out, farm their marketing needs out to advertising and media relations companies or, like Bangor-based Eaton Peabody, the fifth-largest firm in the state, they have a staff person who handles marketing on a part-time basis.

Why all this rainmaking all of a sudden? It wasn't that long ago that it was illegal for law firms to advertise. In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a ruling making it lawful for them to do so, a decision that would revolutionize the legal industry, changing it from a traditional profession to a big business like any other. In the following decades, firms would grow exponentially. "After the Bates decision, [which made it legal to advertise,] competition became a real issue," Rand Ardell says. "The city ˆ— and the state ˆ— is filled with hardworking lawyers who are doing good work. So there's been a need to establish positive distinctions."

The big four have been wrestling over the relatively small Maine market for more than a decade now, and in recent years they've begun to look outside the state for more options. And while they've been doing so, firms from the cities to the south have been expanding north. "The big issue for Maine is that firms are starting to look regionally and nationally. There's a very heightened competitive nature to this business," says Ardell. "Not only are other large firms opening Maine offices, but the big firms in Maine are branching out outside of Maine." To do that, and to attract new business, firms need to raise their profile, Ardell says, and establish those distinctions that make them the better choice for prospective clients.

That Ardell was brought on at Bernstein Shur just a year after the firm opened an office in Manchester, N.H., illustrates this point. "The opening of the New Hampshire office was a critical aspect [in my hiring]," he says. "We also added a number of new attorneys in the past half a year. To supercharge this growth we needed to add a marketing function."

A subtle approach
Supercharging growth is the key phrase. For modern law firms to survive, they simply have to get bigger. One of the primary reasons is the specialization that has occurred in the past several decades. Years ago, when Preti Flaherty's Harold Pachios began an illustrious law career that would take him to Lyndon Johnson's White House, things were different. "Before my time, you were a business lawyer or a litigator," he says. "Now you're an environmental lawyer, an entertainment lawyer, an intellectual property lawyer, a securities lawyer. For a law firm to grow and prosper it has to provide service in all of those areas, and you can't do it as a small law firm.

"Let's say a client comes in with a problem unrelated to tax law," Pachios continues. "In the course of helping the client resolve their problem, a related tax issue might arise, and you need to have a tax lawyer to help them. If you only have 25-30 lawyers, it's hard to have all that expertise," he says.

If firms don't have the needed expertise, clients go elsewhere. So there's pressure to hire staff that can handle niches like tax law ˆ— and then the pressure to make sure there's enough work for them. Finding that work, which used to fall on the shoulders of partners, has largely become the responsibility of the new marketing directors.

"My job is to help Preti Flaherty succeed with business development," says Preti Flaherty marketing director Lisa Meyer, 36, a Bates grad who came to the firm after spending 11 years up the road at Warren Marketing in Portland. But she adds that she and her staff of two share a very broad definition of marketing, one that goes far beyond print and TV ads. You won't see Preti Flaherty attorneys swinging baseball bats on your television anytime soon. While the firm does have a new plasma screen ad at the Manchester Airport, near its new New Hampshire office in Concord, it's a very small piece of the Preti marketing pie.

Rather than do a lot of TV or print media advertising, which Meyer says wouldn't necessarily hit her target market ˆ— business leaders and corporate decision makers ˆ— Meyer concentrates her efforts on raising the profile of the firm in a variety of more subtle ways. She worked for a year to get a Wall Street Journal writer interested in a Preti case that had international ramifications, for example, and her efforts paid off with a page-one, above-the-fold feature on Oct. 1 that portrayed the Portland firm as dynamic, influential and capable ˆ— not to mention global.

"We're positioning our attorneys as leaders in their fields," Meyer says, "so if there's an issue that the media needs to know about they'll call one of our attorneys as their experts." In addition to pushing its lawyers and cases to the media, Preti also sponsors events like women's business networking meetings and a new entrepreneur summit, and it even hosted a huge get together for clients at Fenway Park last July during the Democratic National Convention. Meyer and her staff arrange speaking engagements for their attorneys, and publish an annual report, which Meyer says is unique among Portland firms. (Full disclosure: Mainebiz cosponsored the entrepreneur summit with Preti Flaherty.)

Nathalie Daum, president of the Illinois-based Legal Marketing Association, a nonprofit professional organization that promotes and supports the advertising of law firms, says that in the past three or so years membership in LMA has doubled. She attributes some of this to the maturation of the 20-year-old group, and some to the fact that the 2,575-member outfit is now starting to market itself better. But "the bulk of that is due to the trending and growth of the industry," she says. Seventy-four percent of the largest 250 law firms nationwide now employ a member of the LMA. (In Maine though, there are still only three members.)

Even so, though their ranks are growing exponentially, legal marketers still represent only a fraction of the staff at law firms. "Last time I talked to the Association of Legal Administrators, [a legal industry group,] less than one percent of their membership was classified as marketing people," she says.

In addition, Meyer, Ardell and their colleagues face a certain challenge because of the very nature of law firms. Marketing a business with multiple departments and practice areas, plus several dozen personalities, is not like simply selling a bar of soap. "There is something kind of unique about the law firm structure that makes coordinated marketing difficult," says Ardell. "To some extent lawyers run their own practices. All of these individual attorneys have their own practice groups and their own issues." At Bernstein Shur, there are a "dozen different practice groups, different corporate identities and different locations," says Ardell, "so coordination and consistency is important." The trick is to give this multi-headed behemoth one face.

Moving toward the hard sell
Lisa Meyer knows this all too well. Her job, she says, is to market the overall firm, the practice areas and the individual attorneys, who by their nature are somewhat difficult to market. "Their whole life is based on precedent," says Meyer. "Law is based on everything that came before it, and it's hard for them to understand sometimes that marketing is the exact opposite. We're always thinking about new ideas, trying to figure out what hasn't been done."

Eric Altholz, a Verrill Dana partner who is on the firm's marketing committee and used to work for both Pierce Atwood and powerhouse New York firms, has seen the same thing. "There are plenty of naysayers," he says. "Lawyers are linear thinkers ˆ— show me the facts, and show me them in order. If you can't show them how the time and money spent here translates to more billable hours [they don't get it]."

Once all the lawyers are aboard and going in the same direction, then comes the difficult task of distinguishing your firm from all of the others. Why should a prospective client retain your services rather than the next guy's? "I compare it to buying a car, a house or a suit," says Verrill Dana marketing director Paul Engel, who himself spent years at some of the biggest law firms in the country before coming to Maine a year ago from Cleveland's Jones Day. "You don't just look at one car, house or suit. There are a number of points of contact, and if you look at a combination of those touchpoints over a period of time, you'll get a pretty good idea." Selling law is much the same.

"It's harder and harder to differentiate between us," says Verrill Dana's Altholz. "Image and branding are not words that lawyers are used to using. But we've learned that you have to be able to tell your story in a good way. That image projection is a tangible reflection of how firms think of themselves."

When Harold Pachios began his career as a lawyer, the pre-Bates decision profession was still a very traditional one. "It wasn't so competitive," he says. "Most of the relationships between clients and lawyers went back generations." Now people don't care about your family or what school you went to, who you know, or where you live. "They just want a very high level of service, and they want it promptly and efficientl,"says Pachios.

The role of the legal marketer is to fill the void left by those old traditions, according to Pachios. "Marketing staff tell your story, who you are and how good you are," he says. "We're not saying, 'Do you need a lawyer? Here's our phone number.' The larger firms are simply seeking an identity. You can provide the highest quality legal services around in the most efficient way, and no one's going to come to you if they've never heard of you."

And once they get that identity, and get that new business to retain them, they then have to hang on to that client. "Marketing is not at all strictly about new business development," says Ardell of Bernstein Shur. "It's also very much about expanding and deepening relationships with existing clients." Bernstein Shur is doing that by interviewing clients to see what their needs are, and by researching nascent trends that might effect their clients' businesses. "We're looking to find what are the problems that we can address," says Ardell.

That's been a focus at Verrill Dana, according to Eric Altholz. "A lot of our marketing effort is targeted at existing clients as well," he says. "We're in a world where our clients don't just have one law firm; they might have one primary firm but they use others that specialize or might use another due to conflict of interest. People aren't afraid to move. So there's a large client retention aspect of our marketing."

So far all of this advertising has been of the soft-sell variety. But Altholz sees the day coming when it takes a harder approach. "To me the coming thing is outright sales, to go in front of people and literally ask for their business. Firms in New York, D.C., Boston are beginning to give sales training to lawyers. That's terrifying to lawyers," he says. "But that's beginning to percolate up here."

The hard sell will probably take a while in a place like Maine. Right now, the state's directors of legal marketing are just getting their proverbial feet wet with their rainmaking, compared to ad execs in other industries. But, Meyer says, that's part of the fun. "There are very few advertising jobs that are in such a young area," she says. "In the past four years there's been a huge increase in the number of people who do what I do, not just in Maine but nationally. It's an exciting time."