In The Beginning

How did a guy with 15 years of marketing experience spark a legal marketing revolution? The secret is in the law firm.

"When I was hired," Beese says, "the senior partners told me that they wanted a creative marketing staff. They told me that they wanted the lawyers to leave my department smiling. I took them at their word. "

But the inspiration for the agency format was still nearly a year away. Beese started his tenure at Holland & Hart with a staff of two in April of 2001. One quit immediately. Left with one staffer, Beese set out to hire the professional marketers he would need. Once his staff was up to full strength--eight professionals--Beese and his team spent six months trying to deal with a year's worth of backlogged marketing projects. That period of learning taught Beese and his staff that the old model of the legal marketing department did not work for them. The work wasn't being done quickly enough. The staff felt overwhelmed and struggled with prioritizing their many projects.

"We realized that we needed a new structure to handle our full plate of work," Beese explains. "And we needed a way to provide the high level of customer service that was expected of us. "

Understanding Their Clients

The first thing that the staff did was to take the Myers-Briggs Personality Indicator.

"If we were going to be our own agency," Beese says, "we needed to understand the strengths and personalities of the people on our team. Since we were working in close proximity and coordinating complex projects, we needed to understand everyone's communication style. "

While taking the Myers-Briggs test is fairly unusual for legal marketing staff, what they did next was stranger still. They gave the test to several of the firm's top partners.

"What we found--surprise, surprise--was that lawyers looked at things much differently than we did," Beese says. "They were much more analytical. We also looked at the Myers-Briggs profiles of lawyers nationwide and compared our communication styles. Since the lawyers are our clients, we wanted to know how they looked at the world in order to adapt our styles to be able to communicate with them more effectively. "

Core Values

While exploring the differences in the communications styles of lawyers and creative types, Beese and his staff also looked for the common ground. As it turned out, both groups shared the same set of core values.

“To work well as a team, it was important for us to understand what made work meaningful for us, what we can expect from each other, and to respect each others' differences. The discussion on core values was the basis for forming our mission statement," said Beese.

"We're never going to change the conflict of the creative versus the analytical personality," Beese notes, "but we realized that all of us could agree that we wanted creative marketing efforts that would efficiently meet our goals. Everyone wanted a good work product that was finished on time. And, as creatives, we wanted to work towards a relationship where the lawyers would say 'we may disagree with you, but we trust you about our marketing efforts. "

A New Structure

At a two-day retreat in Colorado Springs, Beese and his marketing staff set out to create a structure that would meet their needs and the needs of their law firm. With the help of consultants Merrilyn Astin Tarlton and Alice Atkins, the department formerly known as Holland & Hart marketing created an in-house marketing agency, which was officially named Imaginate: The Marketing Playground.

Imaginate was born. However, creating an in-house agency was not without its difficulties.

"Everything worth doing has bumps," Beese says. "For example, the attorneys at Holland & Hart have traditionally been able to engage outside marketing vendors. We don't have a lock on the work. We have to prove ourselves. But the end result has been worthwhile. Some of the biggest changes were in how we perceived ourselves and how were are perceived in the firm. "

Clients

One of the first changes was that Beese and his team started to call attorneys "clients" and to treat them that way.

"There's a two-tier system in most law firms with lawyers at the top and all the various non-lawyers underneath," Beese says. "We think of ourselves differently now. We, too, are partners in our own company--this in-house agency. We feel a sense of ownership that we didn't have before. The notion of calling the attorneys 'clients' is a part of that. We feel that we're professionals, too. We're providing an essential service to our clients who are our equals. This sort of ownership has made our work more meaningful. "

Billing

Another change was that Beese's agency measures time the same way that the attorneys do--by the project.

"At the end of every major project, we send an invoice to the client that explains how many hours the project took and includes all of the hard costs," Beese says. "The process has been an eye-opener for many of the lawyers. Some clients had no concept of cost. Billing for our time and costs, just as our clients do, has been a way to show our value to the firm. Attorneys instinctively understand now that we're on the clock just as they are. And, just as attorneys do, we take on pro bono work. Some of our most interesting assignments have been on behalf of a firm client or charity that an attorney or a practice group wanted to support. These activities are also a good way to get the firm's name out in the community. "

Modeling

Being an agency within a law firm allows Beese and the other marketers to "model" good client service methods to their clients. According to Beese, that's where the 'playground' comes in.

"We do client surveys after every significant project," Beese says. "A lawyer asked me the other day about sending a client survey to one of his clients. He thought that his client might feel self-conscious about answering the questions. I told him that my clients--the other attorneys--appreciate being asked to fill out client surveys. They have no problem being completely honest about what went well and what could be improved the next time. In fact, they are happy to be asked for their opinion. "

"Billing our clients, surveying them and showing what value-added services we supply has been a wonderful tool for us," he adds. "It's a chance for us to practice what we preach about client service. More than that, running our department this way has enhanced the professional credibility of our staff. "

Fun

The in-house agency model has also helped Beese and his staff to have fun at work. That's right, that was the f-word used to describe a job.

"Attorneys often comment that there is way too much laughter coming from our end of the hall," Beese says. "If that doesn't happen at least once a month, I'm not doing my job. We want to do a really good job for our clients, and we want to have fun doing it. I always say that we're serious about our work but not about ourselves. The work we do is creative and it should also be fun. Otherwise, why are we doing it?"

Teamwork

The marketing staff has also changed their attitudes about one another since the in-house agency switchover.

"I've noticed that people are coming in earlier and staying later," Beese says. "I'm getting late night e-mails about projects, and people are taking work home. My staff wants to make this extra effort, I think, because they don't want to let their teammates down. "