Jaffe PR White Paper: A Realistic Look at Lost Opportunity Costs Connected with Website Content Writ

The most valuable asset for any business today is its good name: its brand and reputation. This holds just as true for law firms as it does for consumer packaged goods companies or service businesses. According to a recent report published jointly by the World Economic Forum and a major U.S. PR firm, three-fifths of CEOs surveyed believe that corporate brand and reputation represents more than forty percent of a company’s market capitalization. And today, consumers of goods and services turn to the Web to confirm their buying decisions.

Today, it is more critical than ever for law firms to pay considerable time and attention to maintaining or elevating the value and reputation of their brands. This white paper not only examines the unique marketing situation that results from a law firm merger or new hires, but also relates to any law firm that wishes to be a true competitor in the legal marketplace. The bottom line is that many things measure a law firm’s public reputation, but, in most cases, it now begins with website content.

The newly merged firm: so much to do…

When law firms merge or hire new attorneys, no matter how well-established each one of the firms is to begin with, that value and the combined reputation are automatically in flux. The values inherent in the newly merged firm need to be defined quickly; attorneys and other employees must quickly embrace and live by those values so the new firm can deliver on its promises to clients. At the same time, the law firm’s marketing materials must define and reinforce the firm’s brand promise and position the new entity among its competitors to gain the ground it hoped for when first considering the merger.

To achieve that goal, a seemingly infinite number of tasks must be completed in a finite amount of time by the new firm’s combined marketing department and marketing committees. These tasks usually include creating a new visual brand or logo and collateral branding materials, a roll-out campaign and public reputation strategy, and launching a new, combined website with hundreds – maybe thousands – of pages of both new and recycled content.

Launching the new site: the standard approach does not always work

The standard approach always seems to be to formulate a budget first, assign tasks to staff and attorneys, and create a timeline for delivery of each task. Because there is so much to do, a realistic timeline is likely to extend over many months. This approach seems reasonably designed to contain costs in light of the inevitable search for the economy of scale that the merging firms hope to achieve.

But somehow, this standard solution always winds up being quite elusive for many reasons, including the fact that the lawyers’ client work will always come before the assigned marketing tasks. At the end of the day, the actual marketing work will cost the firm much more than contemplated because the initial calculation lacks an important factor: it does not include the opportunity cost of the time it takes to do the marketing work or, maybe even more importantly, the new business opportunities that might be lost as a result of unfulfilled tasks.

Consider a newly merged law firm website that lacks clear messaging and continuity – a new website without the new bios and practice area descriptions that serve as the foundation of the firm’s reputation and experience; a law firm “sales catalog” (including a virtual listing of everything the firm has done and can do). Think about how the immediate absence of this information will negatively affect search engine optimization, let alone the effect of that lack of information on the viewer.

The concept of opportunity cost, first developed by John Stuart Mill, is key in assessing the true cost of any course of action. As defined in Wikipedia, opportunity cost is “the value of the next-best choice available to someone who has picked among several mutually exclusive choices… the real cost of output forgone, lost time, money, pleasure or any other benefit that provides utility.”

The opportunity cost of content that suffers from lack of attention

Of the many tasks that follow a law firm merger or new hires, one is undoubtedly significant: creating attorney biographies that sell the firm’s experience and focus areas. This is an arduous process, as, individually, the two firms are likely to have very different biography styles and formats, and because most law firm biographies are outdated and require a lot of heavy lifting to make the information current. The task, therefore, is burdensome and often relegated to the back burner. Added to the inherent “bottom of the to-do list” mentality often associated with revising biographies is simply the amount of time it takes to do the work required.

We have witnessed seasoned marketers and lawyers who are ultimately surprised to see how long this seemingly simple effort actually takes. It may take a partner two hours to revise her biography, at a cost of $600–$800 of non-billable time and lost fees. But that amount pales in comparison to the larger opportunity cost: a single attorney’s biography is only one of dozens, maybe hundreds of biographies that will need to be written or rewritten, vetted and edited for consistency, proofed, and uploaded. And, if you include the expected time that many lawyers will spend on, essentially, procrastinating and never quite completing what needs to be done on their biographies, that cost becomes hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of hours of lost opportunity time.

Most opportunities are difficult to compare, particularly if an unknown advantage or disadvantage is thrown into the mix. That’s why factoring opportunity cost is an ongoing but important challenge; there are even more costs to factor into the bios example. Consider that some firms will put off launching their new websites until they have every biography in place. If a potential client is searching online for someone with specific legal experience but your firm’s biographies are sitting in virtual limbo waiting to go through the editorial process and then be uploaded, that opportunity cost rises even higher, because the firm has lost out on the chance to gain a new client. Really, there must be a better solution.

Another factor that puts firms at a disadvantage is the lack of search engine optimization (SEO) expertise. These days, if website content lacks optimized keywords, it’s a set-up for search engine failure. There’s no sense writing and uploading a biography that will ultimately rank too low on a Google search. The search engines continuously change their algorithms, and only those who pay attention to these changes are able to modify their Web content and bolster their search engine results. It’s not just biographies we’re talking about, either; it’s practice group descriptions, industry overviews and all of the content in a law firm’s website. Long gone are the days when a website served as a static brochure. Now, Web visitors go to a search engine first and usually rely only on what they see on the very first page of results. Every law firm must maximize the potential of getting onto that first page, and the way to do it is through optimized content.

There’s more…

But wait… there’s more: more opportunity costs. A newly merged firm wants to present itself as an outstanding workplace and a collection of the brightest legal minds. But the lack of a current, well-written website means lost recruiting opportunities and the obvious inability to make an impression on laterals and referral sources. If the website hasn’t launched because the content isn’t being written quickly enough, or, even worse, launches with stale and disorganized content, it can’t perform for the firm.

So, what should a law firm do? We’ve already noted, and this is based on much experience working with law firms on Web content projects, that the timeframe for in-house content completion is several months. The truth is, it’s never just several months, it’s always more. That’s because the lawyers get busy with their billable work and the marketing staff gets busy with the dozens of other important projects, including client satisfaction, public relations, seminars, rankings, business development, holiday cards, newsletters, alerts… and the list goes on.

Of course, everyone knows that the website must be completed, so the pressure is ongoing. The time lost to everyone involved in the website is difficult to quantify, but it is most definitely extensive. The website always becomes a “we’ll get to it soon” type of project. Attorney biographies and practice group descriptions become that high-priority/low-urgency task that lingers in the back of everyone’s minds. That is not the best way to approach work, but it is human nature and, in many work environments, urgency trumps priority simply because urgency begs for attention more effectively.

The website only becomes top-of-mind when a partner learns that a prospect turned to another law firm for representation when it saw that this newly merged law firm’s website was unimpressive and out of date.

Since a brand’s real worth is largely attributed to its reputation, as the CEO study suggests, it is imperative for recently merged law firms to attach a sense of purpose and urgency to implementing the large-scale marketing tasks that are a result of the merger. With so much competition in the legal marketplace, the “we’ll get to it later” approach just doesn’t work. Law firms, whether newly merged or not, need to prioritize attention on their website content, or risk losing new business.

Solutions

No law firm wants to miss an opportunity for new business. The key is to come up with a plan of attack at the outset of a merger that enables the lawyers and marketing staff to get compelling materials onto the new website quickly, and not miss a beat with prospects, referral sources, potential lateral hires and all the other audiences that determine a law firm’s reputation. In other words: limit lost opportunity time. Here are a few options.

• Make content a priority – Make it easy for the lawyers in both firms to revise their biographies by providing them with a format to follow. Give them a short deadline to complete the revisions, and then lean on the marketing department to bring a consistent tone to all of the biographies and get them online right away. Don’t hesitate to get a new website live with smart content that shows a unified front.
• Work with experienced project managers, even outside resources like a writing service – Let them revise all of the materials for the firm, leaving the attorneys with the responsibility of editing only.
• Create an ongoing Content Update Process – A clear-cut process helps the lawyers and marketers appreciate the value of the firm’s website as a marketing tool, enabling them to modify their biographies and practice group descriptions every time there’s a new case, ranking, speaking engagement or other notable achievement.

Above all, figure out the realities of writing. We all know it takes more time than anyone expects at the start, and we all know that lawyers need to use their time to do client work and build business, so it’s just smart to accept those facts right from the start. Get help if you need to. Just don’t let the daily must-do’s put a halt to making your best marketing tool quickly available to your audiences. That’s an opportunity cost no law firm can afford.

Jay M. Jaffe is President and CEO of Jaffe PR. He is widely known in the legal industry as an innovator of legal marketing services and a proponent of the critical importance of a law firm's Public Reputation. Jay has been providing high-level Public Reputation strategies to global law firms for over thirty years. Contact Jay at jjaffe@jaffepr.com.