Blue Ocean Global Technology Interviews Kathleen Leach

Blue Ocean: What is the ultimate role of marketing in a law firm?

Kathleen: I have always told my attorneys that marketing is responsible for articulating and promoting the firm’s brand authentically. If you do a good job, when an attorney says they are from your firm, the figurative door they want to walk through is warmly and widely opened. Then, it is the attorney’s responsibility to sell themselves to the prospective client.

Blue Ocean: How do you build a firm’s brand to open that figurative door?

Kathleen: You build a firm’s brand from the inside out. Start with internal communications. Frequently reiterate the firm’s vision, mission, and client focus/service expectations as an underlying theme, not in a rote fashion. Then, proceed to the more traditional aspects of branding, such as taglines and visuals. Ultimately, consistent and clear content is king in building a brand. This includes podcasts, webcasts, website content, email alerts, and videos. You want to saturate your audience with relevant, insightful content to demonstrate expertise.

Blue Ocean: What are your thoughts on using AI to support a firm’s brand?

Kathleen: Building a brand and saturating an audience is not an easy task. I think AI is going to be a real time-saver in producing the first drafts of content. And the beauty is that marketing teams can leverage this. We’ll overcome the biggest barrier to getting attorneys to write — the dreaded blank page. We’ll give them a version to react to, something to edit, a body copy to make their own with the caveat that they need to QA the “facts” AI presupposes.  

But, it is still a slippery slope. Even if 100% accurate, AI-generated content will not be authentic to the lawyer or the firm. We want to stay true to ourselves at all costs. If we lose our unique sales proposition, the billing rate will tank because we are not offering anything different. People want to work with real people, so the copy still needs that personal touch.

Blue Ocean: How can firms measure their brand?

Kathleen: Most law firms don’t want to invest in primary research to measure the brand to a high degree of confidence. So, instead, you can mine legal industry research that third parties conduct annually. Or, to measure where they are at a point in time, a firm can conduct simple client and prospect surveys to determine brand strength and perceptions. Also, you can add a question or two to the client satisfaction or postmortem interviews you conduct.

Blue Ocean: How important are digital assets to firms?

Kathleen: The sales cycle for the purchase of legal services is long. In the case of a lawyer pursuing business, it often takes eight touch points of some value before billable work is obtained. However, one study showed that when the client is in the driver’s seat, they are somewhere around 60 percent through the sales funnel when they pick up the phone and call a lawyer. The client gets so far down the road without interacting with a lawyer by researching. Therefore, the performance of your digital assets, such as the website, YouTube videos, and social media, is critical. 

In our digital world, elements like the speed of your site, the search terms you come up with, your place on search engine returns, and the inclusion of photos and videos, among others, play a role in your brand’s performance. Being a business-to-business enterprise doesn’t dilute the significance of a digital footprint for lawyers and law firms.

Blue Ocean: What resources does one need to build, monitor, and, if needed, repair their digital presence?

Kathleen: The marketing department is primarily responsible for a firm’s digital presence. This arena is very dynamic — it’s much more than SEO and building a website. To be effective, one needs to find the right resources. Some big firms may be able to effectively staff an electronic marketing function, be it a team or person, but most firms cannot. I have found that third-party software or external specialists are highly desirable. However, even if you outsource the responsibility to specialists, managing those resources is still under marketing’s umbrella. 

If you need to repair your social media presence or deal with a crisis in a viral environment, I suggest quickly turning to firms specializing in that area. Expect to pay good money, but it is necessary.

Blue Ocean: Would you say we have returned to a pre-COVID market environment?

Kathleen: During COVID, using webcasts and alerts, we heightened our marketing efforts and demonstrated that we were essential to our clients’ businesses. That was great; we held the hill. But it’s a new day, and we need to get lawyers and clients back together, working face-to-face. 

Professional service is a people business, and clients buy a lawyer’s time, not just any lawyer, but “their lawyer.”  Connections are more easily made and relationships maintained in in-person interactions.

Throughout 2022, event space sales managers reported that “the royal we” only pulled half of what we had traditionally attracted to our seminars. Post-COVID, we need to purposefully pull back from offering comfortable, remote options like webinars where the audience can multitask and attend passively. Our carrot to show up in person needs to be bigger and juicier. Many people like the convenience of being remote. Once this changes, people will appreciate all the benefits of in-person events: networking, food, drink, gifts, seeing their trusted attorneys, and being able to sneak in a freebie question or two.

Blue Ocean: Please share any favorite quote or mantra you live by and why you identify with it.

Kathleen: “Happy are those who dream dreams and are ready to pay the price to make them come true,” by Leon Joseph Suenens. I have powered through professional challenges, starting with being the first in my family to graduate from college. I have also relocated many times for my career. I don’t view an initiative’s failure as a career failure. I see it as trying, striving, and breaking new ground. I learn and move forward and upward, but sometimes pay a price.

Blue Ocean: What passions or interests do you pursue outside of work?

Kathleen: My husband and I have been involved with a relatively new dog breed, Silken Windhound, for nearly 20 years. We have bred, showed, and raced these dogs in venues throughout the Midwest and East Coast. We are animal people who love touring zoos, and our dream vacation was to go to Africa for a photo safari. It was the only vacation where I wanted to turn around and go back when I got off the plane at home. Returning to Africa is on my bucket list.