Today’s Wills and Probate, Today’s Family Lawyer and Today’s Conveyancer – three media outlets that many lawyers, legal PR’s and law firm marketers will be very familiar with. The publishing house behind these titles also hosts a range of independently judged awards that support the sector – with the British Wills and Probate Awards happening this week on Thursday 21st October. But why enter yourself, your team or your firm for an award? We asked David Opie, managing director of Today’s Media for his insights. Increased profile in your chosen markets Win or lose, in the lead up to the event, during the event and afterwards, the name of your law firm or business will be splashed around, with industry experts, clients and potential clients becoming aware of your business name delivering a welcome boost to your brand. Reinforcing your reputation Being recognised by a credible and high quality awards process gives your potential clients reassurance that you are a quality firm that will deliver a quality service to them. Effective as part of your overall marketing strategy Equally if the award is local to your area, and you are marketing to the local area, then this can boost your chances of being instructed. Similarly, if you want to be known for something in particular – for example the excellent service and advice you provide – then selecting an award that focuses on that area lends credibility. Greater influence through association An award can raise the profile of your company; the effect can be stratospheric! Positioning your firm in the presence of similar industry greats will certainly improve your firm’s profile. Publicity opportunities and increasing profits A nomination alone will allow you to spread your firm’s message far and wide. Your company will benefit from the awards’ press coverage, marketing collateral and social media coverage. These benefits alone will more than cover any entry fee and will expose your firm to new sections of the market. All of this could lead to more customer leads, greater conversion rates and improved profitability. So why not enter? You’ve probably got a stronger chance of being shortlisted and maybe even of winning than you might think. A submission or win can provide a platform for your marketing for months to come. Writing a submission is generally easier than you think as well – you’ll be given clear instructions and guidelines as to what information to include – and once you get going you’ll probably find you have more to say than you can fit in in the available space! The British Wills and Probate Awards are being hosted at the majestic Grand Hotel Birmingham on Thursday 21st October. The British Wills and Probate Awards are being hosted at the majestic Grand Hotel Birmingham on Thursday 21stOctober. As well as the in-person event, the ceremony will be hosted virtually live online, register to view here https://www.britishwillsandprobateawards.co.uk/register-to-view/ For more advice on awards – why not also check out the following: Law Firm awards 2021 LexRex’s Top Tips How to write a winning award submission Legal Awards – Maximising the PR opportunities of winning Why should lawyers enter awards? Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3
Today Legal 500 launches its 2022 edition of the UK Solicitors’ Guide. And for us, that marks the start of legal directories season. Last year we wrote a gut-busting number of directories for a wide range of firms from across the width and breadth of the UK. Our takeaways? The UK has phenomenal law firms doing outstanding work. Our team worked on some fascinating submissions, with specialisms ranging from UHNW family, tech investment in the UK via Silicon Valley, business immigration, agricultural divorce, catastrophic injury, IP and much more. It is so exciting to see the breadth of legal work being carried out with so much passion and genuine investment in clients, their lives and businesses. I can’t ever imagine getting bored of drafting and even re-drafting case studies; although it’s fair to say we were all ready for a rest by the time the final deadlines rolled around in the Spring. This year’s plan Needless to say we are already deep into planning our directories season. Our retained and regular clients’ submissions are already into the diary, and we are now taking bookings for our submissions drafting service from new clients. You can book a discovery call with us to find out more. Didn’t get the ranking you were hoping for? Unfortunately not every team and individual gets the ranking they deserve and / or that they were hoping for. This may be for a number of reasons – perhaps your referees didn’t ‘show up’ for you, maybe your submission wasn’t drafted as well as it could be, or perhaps you simply ran out of time to give the submission and / or referee spreadsheet the time and effort needed. We are delighted to introduce a submission review service for the first time this year. If your submission didn’t perform as you’d hoped – get in touch and we’ll review it for you. There’s no charge for this service. Book a review with us now. Do you DIY your submissions? Our Successful Submissions Toolkit is now available again for the 2021 / 2022 season and this year it is accessible fully online. Simply select the most appropriate package for your firm, create your login and start learning how to draft outstanding submissions. The Toolkit is extremely comprehensive with 18 chapters and includes Guides, Downloadable assets, Videos, Checklists, Planners and much more. Why buy our Toolkit? It saves you time and money, and will enable you to create submissions that will get you ranked or move up in the rankings. Create your Toolkit login now. Just need a bit of training? Our very popular Introduction to The Legal 500 and Introduction to Chambers and Partners courses will return in November. These courses are aimed at the more junior or inexperienced end of the submissions drafting function. Typically attended by junior marketers, paralegals and other support staff, each hour-long live webinar provides a background to the relevant legal directory and includes a wide range of practical advice, tips, guidance, best practice suggestions and the opportunity for delegates to ask questions within the session. Join our legal directories mailing list for more information about these sessions and to hear about them before everybody else. Want Legal 500 and Chambers and Partners tips, support, advice, deadline reminders? Our Directories Bulletin is a specialist legal directories newsletter. Packed full of tips, advice, deadline reminders and much more we tend to send it out every 2 – 4 weeks during directories season. We have already sent out our first edition – to ensure you don’t miss any more sign up here. Want to meet the Chambers and Partners editors? Next up in the planning cycle is the Chambers and Partners launch which takes place this year on Thursday 21st October. Just in time for the launch, our extremely popular webinar In Conversation with Chambers and Partners is taking place on Thursday 7th October. Hear from the sub-editors of the UK Solicitors’ Guide and the international High Net Worth Guide. The session will cover the Guides’ methodology, how to improve rankings or get ranked, the submission form, the referee spreadsheet and much more. Delegates can also submit questions in advance. Book your free place now. Walk don’t run! Remember that directories season is a marathon not a sprint. Take things steady, remember we are here to support you with options for every budget – and if you do need our support – book in quickly with us as we’re already getting busy!
Legal PR and marketing consultancy LexRex Communications has joined collaborative networking, business development and support group Northern Legal Alliance. The group, which is the brainchild of lawyer and entrepreneur Andrew Byrne, was conceived in 2020 initially as a networking and business development group for lawyers; but which has now developed into a hub for both practitioners and suppliers to the legal sector. The alliance was created to support the sector and is built around principles of non-competition and collaboration. Andrew commented: “There are a number of membership groups for both lawyers and suppliers to the sector. However very few focus upon the North specifically, and the huge opportunities that abound for lawyers away from London. “I created Northern Legal Alliance to both support the legal sector up here, as well as opening the doors for both lawyers and those who work with lawyers to build their networks, support each other and collaborate. “When Victoria approached me to ask about joining the Alliance, it was a no brainer. Victoria already has strong relationships with a number of our members; and her expertise and knowledge of PR and marketing within the legal sector, supported by her real-life experiences of time spent in practice, mean that she and LexRex are a perfect fit.” Victoria added “It’s great to see a group of northern practitioners and suppliers coming together with an aim of collaboration, making new connections and shining the spotlight on the achievements of law firms and the sector outside of London. “We have strong relationships across the UK but I always welcome any opportunity to work and build connections here; where I live and deliver a lot of my work.” Northern Legal Alliance has recently started delivering face-to-face networking events and is currently planning its first conference for Spring 2022. You can find out more about the Northern Legal Alliance here.
We’ve put together our top tips for lawyers and law firms on how to write winning award submissions in 2021, and how to manage the submissions process. Whether you are already an award winning lawyer, or work for an award winning firm; or even if this is your first attempt at entering an award; our advice will help. 1. Consider what you are trying to achieve When you are considering entering an award, it’s always sensible to stop and ask ‘why’? This will help you to understand which ones to bother with and which to avoid. If you think that awards will help with new business for example – think about whether your target audiences will recognise or be impressed if you win the award in question. Will they care? Or actually, do you take the view that the award win will fit seamlessly into your marketing plan and act as a kitemark and something to talk about on social media and in your newsletter. Neither of these answers are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ – they are simply considerations to help ensure that you are entering an award for the right reasons and that the action supports and fits into your firm’s overall marketing strategy. 2. Research the award This sounds obvious but not everybody does it. Check out the specific criteria and be honest about whether you meet them. You will need to be able to demonstrate that you fulfil at least 80% of what is required, otherwise you’re unlikely to be shortlisted. You should also check out the awards’ reputation and how they they are judged. Some awards are simply money making racquets where you pay for a ‘win’ or a place in a Top Ten list or similar. These awards are not credible and our advice would be to avoid them like the plague. Others – like The Law Society’s Excellence Awards are managed and organised by a professional body and are judged fairly and effectively by a panel of independent judges. They are hard to win, and rightly so. (We have written award winning submissions for these Awards and they take time, effort and a strong performance by the firm making the submission). 3. Look at the previous winners Are you in the same league? Can you find out anything about their submissions, and if so – can your submission compare? It’s simply a waste of time putting together a submission if it’s clear from the outset that you won’t be shortlisted. 4. Draft the best possible submission First of all, take a detailed look at the criteria. You can normally quite easily pick out the key elements the judges are looking for. One of the easiest and most effective approaches is to print the criteria and then highlight what is required. Then put these into bullet points and write down your own bullet points that evidence or demonstrate where your achievements meet each requirement. Further, treat the submission as a story. Take the judges on a journey and remember to back up statements with facts and evidence. Follow the sequence of your initial list of bullets, so that the judges can literally place a tick next to each of the criteria. If you do this, you’ll make it much easier for the judges to give a high score, and hopefully get your submission on to the top of the pile. 5. Check out the evidential requirements Make sure you have a detailed understanding of what is required to accompany any written submission. Some awards require video or other evidence so it is important to know and understand what exactly you’ll need to put together from the offset. Trying to pull together evidence at the 12th hour is not only stressful, but is also unlikely to put you in the best light. Rushed evidence is also unlikely to get you shortlisted. 6. Diarise and stick to the deadline This shouldn’t even be a tip as it’s so very clearly an obvious point. From experience though we know that deadlines can slip. Diarise and double-diarise. Give yourself the time and space to write the best submission you can. 7. Check and check again Once the submission is written, check it, run a spelling and grammar check and get somebody else to read it. Poor spelling and inaccurate grammar is never a good look. 8. Pull together an awards calendar It makes sense to know how many awards there are that could be relevant to, your team or your firm, and start to keep a track of them. A calendar will help you to plan your ‘awards year’ and also to record your shortlistings, wins and any other observations you have of each relevant set of awards. Many of the regional law societies run their own awards, as do the majority of the legal trade magazines and publishers, and a number of sector specific organisations such as STEP. Regional Chambers of Commerce and other business and networking organisations also tend to run awards. We produce an awards calendar – drop us a line and we’ll send it to you. You can access this by emailing us info@lexrexcommunications.com. 9. Outsource to experts If you are a busy marketing team or if you don’t have a marketing function, it can be a better use of your time to concentrate on either the marketing elements of your role that can’t easily be outsourced; or on fee earning or quite simply running your law firm. Outsourcing your award submissions frees up your time, but also using an expert means you are more likely to a) understand your prospects and b) get to the shortlist. You can now book an ‘Ask an Expert’ slot to discuss any awards queries you have with a member of the LexRex team. You can book your free place here. Spaces are limited to 3 per month. 10. Plan your winning strategy It’s all very well following the above top tips – but what if you win? Remember
Will 2021 be the year we return to work? And networking? Who knows… Either way though, many law firms and lawyers to a greater or lesser degree rely upon their networks to keep the new business cogs turning, and that is unlikely to change any time soon. But how do lawyers network post-pandemic? Here are my 5 top tips for how to approach post-pandemic networking in 2021. 1. Ask people about their comfort levels for face-to-face contact. My recent poll on LinkedIn found that 47% of people who responded were already comfortable being ‘out and about’. This left 38% who were quite simply ‘not sure’ about when they would return to face-to-face events, socialising, meetings and / or networking (the remainder were planning on getting out and about in line with the next two UK lockdown relaxation dates of May 17th and June 21st respectively). So what do these results mean for networking? Quite simply – you need to understand that not everybody is ready to hop back onto the lunch and coffee bandwagon. Of course for some, networking was always akin to pulling teeth, so don’t expect those people to rush back ‘out there’ anytime soon. But for others, there’s a real reluctance or fear, quite understandably. And that brings me back to my first top tip – ask people where they are happy to meet, and ensure that you enable them to network with you in accordance with their comfort levels. If they want to Zoom, meet them on Zoom. If they want to party… well, you know where the bar is! 2. Remember that networking is all about building connections So don’t be a rookie and start selling. Be interested in the other person. Admittedly, this can be a bit more difficult on Zoom, for example, as you can’t easily pick up on non-verbal signals as you do naturally in real life. Still – one benefit of Zoom is that it can enable you to perhaps be more ‘human’. It’s difficult to be stuffy when you’re sitting in your lounge in your slippers with a brew. My advice would be to embrace that reality rather than try to hide it. Same with errant children, partners, the window cleaner or Mr Hermes all appearing on screen. When we try to hide these things, that can create embarrassment (our own), which I also think can create a bit of mistrust – i.e. what is this person hiding? So, be authentic. Perhaps get dressed though. 3. Stay in contact with people after the event Normally after meeting people face-to-face, we may offer to drop over an email – perhaps with some follow up information, dates for a second meeting or simply a note to say thank you. When you haven’t actually ‘met’ somebody – it’s even more important to follow up. For some reason, I think it’s easier to forget somebody when you haven’t actually physically eye-balled them. So get those calendar notes in the diary to follow up once, twice, however many times. Don’t be forgotten. 4. Keep your distance If you are meeting somebody face-to-face, it’s important to remember that this may still be an anxious time for them. Accordingly, it’s only polite to be mindful of the space between you. Although in the UK we can now meet outside for food, some people will be comfortable with crowds, others will prefer a greater degree of social distancing. I’m not suggesting that you become a mind-reader, but be mindful of body language. It is possible to spot if somebody is becoming uncomfortable and again, in my opinion, it’s better to ask somebody if they are uncomfortable – giving them an escape route rather than them feeling they have to go somewhere that they feel unsafe. 5. Mix up your meeting places The great outdoors – haven’t we all rediscovered it over the past year! It’s felt like a privilege to jump on my old bike and hit the cycle tracks, and running has become something I’ve grown to tolerate more easily. So why limit exercise to personal time. Covid seems to spread less easily outside, so why not do your networking on the go. That could look like a call when you’re walking alone, a ‘netwalking’ session in a group or simply meeting and having your networking chat whilst you wander. This works just as easily in the city as the countryside by the way, and the coffee’s often better! I hope you’ve found my COVID-friendly networking tips helpful. Do comment or share with your friends if so. Victoria Moffatt is the founder and managing director of LexRex Communications, and a former solicitor. To find out more about our services, please visit: https://www.lexrexcommunications.com/ You can also contact us on 0161 393 6121 or email us on info@lexrexcommunications.com Connect with Victoria on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn
Media relations typically form an essential cornerstone in any PR project or retainer with law firms. Historically, agencies have put their clients into the media spotlight to promote, raise profile, respond to negative publicity, repair reputations and create thought leaders and indeed thought leadership. Done well, media relations can be extremely powerful; enabling lawyers and indeed the broader firm to broadcast their key messages to their target audiences and often beyond. Strategy-led media relations is a tactic used to support a broader set of business goals, themselves driven by the firm’s business strategy; and is usually therefore just one tactic amongst a range of other effective and measurable tactics aimed at achieving or exceeding the said goals in order to deliver the strategy. The current media environment But over the course of the past decade (and probably earlier) media relations and the media has been changing. As social media has grown as a news source (albeit an unregulated and often factually incorrect one), some traditional media sources have contracted. The printed newspaper is the most obvious casualty, with readership figures for the National publications tending to have halved over the previous decade. Statistics taken from the Audit Bureau of Circulation via Wikipedia. Here are some examples: The Sun 2010 2019 3,006,565 1,410,896 The Daily Telegraph 2010 2019 691,128 360,345 Interestingly, free publications such as The Evening Standard and Metro have actually grown readership-wise in the same period. Remember though that these publications tend to be given away in traditionally high footfall areas such as stations, tube stations and other areas where people gather. So expect to see their readerships decline significantly once 2020’s figures have been released. Metro 2014* 2019 1,362,893 1,426,050 The Evening Standard 2010 2019 601,960 864,620 *Earliest date data available. At the same time that the National titles have been broadly declining, so have Trade, Women’s titles, Music. This article from the BBC paints a painful picture of the current situation, as does this piece on current journalist attitudes and concerns from the publication read by journalists, The Press Gazette. On the flip side of the coin, Broadcast and Radio remain strong contenders for our attention, with 89.6% – nine in ten people in the UK – listening to the radio at least once a week. Broadcast consumption during lockdown rose to almost 6 hours 25 minutes per person today, a full hour and a half more than in 2019. Interestingly, much of that consumption was broadcaster television with most of the increase due to increased news consumption. Why does any of this matter? This stuff matters because it will all have an effect on how you approach (or should approach) media relations. The skills that your marketing team or external consultants were using to secure media relations need to be updated. The press release, whilst still relevant, is less effective for broadcast opportunities – where news is very visual, and relies less upon the ‘cut and paste’ techniques that suits the press release and business / regional publication journalist so well. Further, if the future is broadcast – your thought leaders need to become ‘broadcast ready’. Again, the skills they were probably taught about TV work will now need to be updated to include interviews via Zoom, or self-created video content. Another interesting point to note is that whilst some elements of the media have been shrinking, the numbers of PR’s has been growing (95,000 in 2019 vs 86,000 in 2018). This is likely to mean fewer opportunities being chase down by more consultancies. What do we need to do? Right now there are a number of things you can do. 1. Audit your media relations activities to check they are still working for you 2. Think about other tactics that can support your media relations activities 3. Consider whether you can re-use any media relations results effectively (you should be doing this anyway but it’s worthwhile mentioning) – so for example, social media sharing, blogs, newsletters, podcats. 4. Audit your marketing strategy to ensure it is still delivering 5. Consider some training. Now is a great time to invest in staff training as it can be done online, from home, at a time to suit you and your team. You may want to consider training in: a) Video content b) Social media and how to effectively use it c) Copywriting d) Media relations and updating your approach e) Strategic communications f) Digital communications **Plug warning… as you’d expect, we provide training in all of these areas. We also deliver effective marketing strategies to do the hard work for you. Drop us a line for more information: info@lexrexcommunications.com
Last year I was delighted to be asked by PM Forum if I’d like to present a webinar to their members. Of course, I said yes please! So, on 14th January 2021 I duly logged into Zoom and presented my thoughts to over 200 members (full disclosure – I’m so glad it was in webinar format so I couldn’t see so many faces staring back at me!) I’d spent quite a lot of time before Christmas thinking about what I could possibly talk about that could add value to a bunch of highly experienced marketers working across a range of professional services businesses. I knew I didn’t want to talk tactics, as interesting and effective as tactics invariably are. And I knew I’d have to keep my talk slightly generic – so taking me out of my comfort zone of law firms. Getting deeper and deeper into my thoughts, I started thinking about the past 12 months and the challenges that we, as a business have faced, in terms of dealing with COVID19. Now I’m not saying I handled things perfectly (of course there were many mistakes along the way with hindsight!) However, not only are we still a functioning business, but also one that is starting to grow again, which is great. Anyway, the process of thinking about the steps I took during the first and subsequent lockdowns, and where I think I did get things right, started me thinking about the strategy that I developed. I remember very clearly back in March realising that things were about to change dramatically and that I needed to start to plan. As I said, lots of mistakes (in particular not keeping a close enough eye on cash, spending on something that I now realise I didn’t really need and still haven’t been able to achieve the actual thing I was aiming for – FAIL!) BUT lots of things I did get right. I do also remember very clearly not being able to think at all during the first two weeks of lockdown one, but then realising that I had to clear my brain, put my thinking hat on, and be proactive, sensible, ambitious, realistic and sharp. My mantra (I don’t really like that word but haven’t found a suitable replacement) became ‘maintain… and be ready to grow’. It was that simple. That mantra though only came about as a result of a lot of deep thinking about where the legal profession was going to be heading over the following weeks and months and how we, as a business, could face the challenges that were coming. If you’re interested in that thought process and the conclusions I came to – you can read a post I created on LinkedIn at the time. If you are a member of The Law Society’s Management Section, you can also read my reflections on that original post and my predictions for 2021 in January 2021’s Managing for Success (£). So what does all of this have to do with the PM Forum webinar? Well broadly, my thoughts and actions during the various lockdowns and school closures have been intentionally strategic. I have tried really hard to ‘zoom out’ and ensure my actions and indeed decisions not to act have been strategic. Being strategic during times of real stress and uncertainty is, I’ve found, quite a skill and certainly it can often feel much easier and comforting to drop into what I’m going to call the tactical ‘comfort zone’. This realisation and the putting into effect of a ‘strategy first’ mindset then led me to thinking that other marketers in professional services might also benefit from following my approach. And that is what led to me presenting my first PM Forum webinar on ‘Creating an Effective PR and Marketing Strategy for 2021’. PM Forum members can watch the webinar, and everybody else can view the slides. The session generated some great feedback, from junior marketers: “As someone who is a junior in my team, I found it interesting to hear about what happens “above” and learn ways I could potentially influence those conversations. Thank you for giving such a great talk”, through to more seasoned professionals: “I thought it was useful and informative”. If you are a marketer in a law firm, a partner or if you run your own firm, then the good news is that we have a training session, Creating an effective marketing strategy, that we can deliver for you and your firm. The training session will take you through how to get into the strategic mindset and start to create effective marketing strategies that not only take into account the huge changes of the past 12 months, but also build upon the short-, medium- and long-term trends that we are starting to see emerge as a result of COVID19. My hour-long webinar will focus upon: The 6 key elements of a marketing strategy The importance of key messages and target audiences Using 2020’s lessons to guide 2021’s practice Identifying the trends that should inform your marketing strategy Choosing tactics that will be effective Measurement Budget We are delivering this session as a bespoke in-house training session. Contact us to find out more mailto: info@lexrexcommunications.com.
We are delighted to announce the launch of our latest specialist product for the legal services market, the LexRex Legal 500 Toolkit. As a result of many years’ experience drafting submissions for law firms across both Chambers and Partners and The Legal 500, we have used this knowledge to create our unique Toolkit products. The Legal 500 Toolkit is jam-packed full of advice to help law firm marketers and lawyers to create effective Legal 500 submissions. However, the Legal 500 Toolkit goes further than just advice on crafting submissions. The Toolkit also provides advice on how to analyse your team’s or firm’s prospects of success, how to market your ranking successes, how to engage effectively with referees and much more. The advice provided within the Toolkit ranges from templates, through to ‘how to’ guides, planners and ‘to do’ lists, with advice provided on every single element of the submission process over 16 individual chapters. The Legal 500 Toolkit joins our other directories product, The Chambers and Partners Toolkit, and together our Toolkits provide law firms with a complete advisory service for the directories process. LexRex founder and managing director Victoria Moffatt commented: “I have long suspected that there was a real appetite amongst marketing managers and lawyers alike for legal directories support. Whilst it is possible to learn how to create effective submissions and start to understand the processes behind the directories research, it takes time. And unfortunately, time is one thing that many of us just don’t have. “Although LexRex has offered a consultancy and drafting service for many years which is enduringly popular, for smaller law firms and the larger outfits alike, there often simply isn’t the budget available to outsource as much as those firms would like. “Our Toolkits help to meet this need by providing education and support throughout the directories process and beyond. We have literally poured our knowledge and experience into creating a set of DIY assets that provide exceptional value and genuine insight.” Other directories services In addition to our Toolkits, we also provide law firms with consultancy and advice via our Directories Bulletin newsletter. This specialist publication is produced every 2 – 4 weeks during directories season and contains a wide range of advice and top tips to lawyers, marketing managers and practice managers alike. You can sign up to receive the Directories Bulletin here: https://mailchi.mp/598c8f12165e/directories-bulletin Further, you can access our unique expertise by booking a place on one of our Directories Audits. During this 30-minute slot with our managing director Victoria Moffatt, you can bring any and all of your directories challenges to the table and Victoria will advise and provide consultancy on complementary basis. Not only is Victoria a directories expert with more than a decade’s experience in creating stand-out submissions, she is also a former lawyer with a deep understanding of not only the law, but also how law firms operate. Book your Directories Audit now by emailing info@lexrexcommunications.com An Introduction to The Legal 500 and An Introduction to Chambers and Partners: our Introduction To webinars provide first-time submitting lawyers, junior marketers and support staff with a detailed overview of the submissions process; what it is, how it works and most importantly – how to complete the submission form and referee spreadsheet. We run our courses frequently during submissions season. Book your place now.
2020 has been, let’s be honest, interesting. A global pandemic, significant curbs on our freedoms, lack of contact with friends and loved ones, schools closed for months at a time, so many deaths, long COVID. The list of negatives is seemingly endless. And from a business perspective, yep pretty dodgy in some ways too. However. Not all bad news and doom and gloom from us. In 2020 we… Launched a webinar series called Trusted Partner. We helped our clients and the broader legal community by becoming a source of trusted information. 2. Almost tripled the size of our mailing list as a result of Trusted Partner. We are now in touch with many, many more lawyers and marketers in law firms as a result. 3. Turned our face-to-face networking event – An Audience with Chambers and Partners – into a Zoom webinar, and tripled our audience size as a result 4. Created from scratch and rolled out our Chambers Toolkit in around 8 weeks. It has 18 chapters. It’s informative, clients love it. 5. Brought in media relations work with two new clients – one we’ve never worked with previously, the other was last a client in 2014. 6. Lost a lot of work initially, but have subsequently come back up to almost pre-COVID levels. 7. Dramatically increased our pipeline. Our prospects list is healthier than it has been in years. 8. Really proud of this one – kept everybody busy and paid. We don’t have employees so there was no requirement for me to pay anybody. But I did. Go me. 9. Stayed sane. Only half-joking about this. There were some very dark days. There were tears – during team meetings – just the once. 10. Stuck by my COVID-maxim “Maintain… and be ready to grow”. So 2020, in many ways I won’t be sorry to see you go. In others, I can look back and say that this was the year that not only tested but perhaps also made me. I also recognise that I am very, very lucky to have an outstanding team but also that things could have been so, so very much worse. Let’s see what 2021 brings. Seasons Greetings everybody. See you on the other side.
A couple of weeks ago we started to promote our Legal Directories Audit to subscribers of our exclusive directories newsletter, the Directories Bulletin. The audit is aimed at law firm marketing managers and partners with responsibility for managing or drafting Chambers and Legal 500 submissions and is essentially a free 30 minute chat with LexRex managing director and founder, Victoria Moffatt. The issues raised in the audits we have completed so far have been varied and unpredictable. We’re finding that the listed lawyers really value their rankings, but perhaps aren’t always as keen as they should be to engage with the actual submission process. That can be frustrating for marketing managers who feel pressure to create outstanding submissions, but without the necessary support to make this happen. Newer entrants to the market are keen to make their presence known, so expect an influx of these boutique and younger practices to start to make a dent in the rankings over the coming years. There is frustration that neither Legal 500 nor Chambers have released their research schedule yet – although Chambers has confirmed that there will be no deadlines earlier than mid-December 2020. Some marketing managers are furloughed – those subject to part-time furlough are feeling hamstrung in that their workload doesn’t appear to have reduced along with their salary and hours. As we know, directories are pretty time-consuming, so strategic decisions will need to be made where firms are asking their marketing and BD teams to stand down. As is probably clear, we work with a wide range of different types of law firm from across the whole of the UK. Our legal directories expertise has enabled us to expand our reach beyond the boutiques we have traditionally served with our PR and media relations services, and as a result we have a very detailed understanding of the issues facing law firms (of all sizes and set up). So if you have responsibility for legal directories, in whatever capacity, and you’d like to benefit from our years of expertise – drop us a line to book your Audit today. We can discuss any of the challenges you are currently facing, and we’d be delighted to help where we can with advice and suggestions to make your life easier. Get in touch now.
