Yesterday’s Boston Globe Online (maybe offline too……I didn’t see it) carried an article entitled “Law firms learn how to compete: Rivalry forces attorneys to act like a business, seeking data on other firms and their clients.”

The article, by Sacha Pfeiffer, talks about how competitive intelligence is only beginning to be used by law firms due to increasing competition:

“It used to be that in-house counsel would pick up the phone and call a friend, and that’s how work came in,” said Jasmine Trillos-Decarie, who is also director of marketing for the law firm Goodwin Procter LLP, which has offices in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C . “Or you always worked with one company, so you always got that work. But the nature of the business has changed dramatically, and we’re being expected to compete more. . . . Competitive intelligence analysis can help us understand how to do that.”

My favorite quote in the article:

`To a client, one big law firm looks much the same as every other — all our websites look the same and all our brochures look the same — so we’re all struggling with how to differentiate ourselves in the marketplace,” Smith said. “Competitive intelligence has to do with being smarter about where you look for business and how you go about doing that. And as marketers and business development people in law firms, that’s really our goal: to help our lawyers do just that.”

The quote is from Brian T. Smith, director of marketing for the law firm Day, Berry & Howard LLP.

It’s a different approach. Rather than trying to appear distinct so more clients come to them, firms are actively going to clients. And before going to the client, they’re doing their homework.

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Last week I attended a Legal Marketing Association meeting here in Boston that included a panel of journalists discussing how and why they cover legal stories. The panel included representatives from both general and industry newsletters.

Though I think the meeting would be most useful to larger firms, the panel gave some advice on how and when a firm should contact the media for a story idea.

Marketing professionals at law firms understand how beneficial it is to be covered in the press. If an article gives a favorable impression of a firm, the exposure could be better than advertising money could buy.

However, it is important to know that the news is just that: news. News is not advertising.

Though introducing a new attorney may be a significant, interesting story within a firm, it may not be considered newsworthy for the outside world. Panelists agreed that though news of this sort is not likely to generate a story, they are happy to receive notices of this sort. In fact, one panelist (representing an area business newspaper) said that receiving notices of new partners, attorneys, etc. are useful to him, as it makes it easier to find experts to interview when a story breaks.

The most repeated theme of this panel was the idea that newspapers are interested in what firms are doing, but do not want to publish thinly-veiled PR pieces. There simply has to be an objective news story underlying anything they write about. They understand that the firm would love to be the subject of a glowing puff piece, but that’s not what they’re about.

I saw a good example of how a firm had an angle that helped them garner press attention in Your Marketing Sucks by Mark Stevens:

For one investment firm, we put a headline on a news release that read “Bulls, Bears, and Armadillos.” Everyone knows that bull is the term for an optimist on Wall Street, and if you are negative you are a bear. But an armadillo? It was a term we coined for an investor who armed himself against a prickly stock market. That was intriguing to the media, and, as a result, the investment firm got substantial press coverage.

(pg. 155)

The takeaway: Don’t try to put one over on journalists. They need content, so they’ll welcome your input and story ideas. Just make sure you give them an actual story, not just fluff.

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