Speaking at the 40th annual LMA was an absolute pleasure. Thanks to Brooke Loucks and Amy Zuckerman Moll for partnering with me to deliver our insights, experiences and advice on branding in Big Law.



I’ll be sharing some overarching thoughts soon about the event but wanted to highlight what’s on the minds of legal marketers based on data collected during our session. 

Here’s an interesting entrée to talking brand with legal marketers…

So about 65% of legal brands are in their midlife or older? Feels right. They have been around for a long time, but I will say that so many felt they were in dire need of a makeover. 

We also probed on market intelligence and found something even more interesting:

55% of brands are doing little to no market analysis with clients or competitors!?! I know it can seem daunting, but there are easy ways to build processes in order to make this a non-resource intensive part of what your team does. It doesn’t need to take six months and cost a ton…really. And, believe me, this information will capture partners’ attention more than almost anything else you can do. 

Then we wanted to know what’s on the top of to-do lists across legal branding:

Honestly, this isn’t a huge surprise to me. I could have predicted the highly visible, tangible stuff like social and web. And we hear all the time that consistency in telling our story without a disciplined means to do so is nearly impossible in a partnership, but I wouldn’t have thought 1/3 of firms felt that way. Oh…just want to say I feel for those 21% who said “Everything!” 

Finally, we wanted to talk pain points. I’ll get right to the data:

Across the board this just speaks to the need for better, tighter systems which enable more efficient ongoing brand management across firms. In the session, Amy and I talked a lot about design of processes and teams and it’s clear legal marketers are in need. 

As brand becomes an increasingly important focus in the legal world, it’s going to be a topic not only on the minds of marketing teams, but firm leadership who are driven to stay relevant and ahead. I sincerely look forward to seeing where this conversation goes over the next year and appreciate everyone who joined us.