Duane Morris Marketing Program Ranked No. 1

By Elizabeth Anne "Betiayn" Tursi

While many law firms struggle to define their marketing and business development function, Philadelphia’s Duane Morris has clearly articulated its vision. The firm was ranked No.1 in the second annual MLF 50: The Top 50 Law Firms in Marketing and Communications.

Out of the hundreds of law firms with marketing programs, these 50 firms have attained the status of being considered the best programs in the country. It is a testament to the fabulous strides that law firm marketing, business development and media programs have achieved over the last year. There is good news here: Marketing is alive, well and prospering at many of the AmLaw 200 firms. The profession has come a long way in terms of sophistication, depth and creativity.

You can find the MLF 50 rankings online at http://www.ljnonline.com/pub/ljn_marketing/20_7A/news/147710-1.html.

The firms were judged on their:

• Marketing strategy
• Results
• Marketing department staffing
• Communications/PR/media relations
• Commitment
• Advertising
• Web site and blogs
• Client service programs
• Outreach

To help elevate it from a regional powerhouse to an international platform, leadership recruited Ed Schechter as the firm’s first Chief Marketing Officer 5 years ago and gave him the responsibility and authority to create a first-rate, highly skilled marketing team. Ed instituted measures to track time, costs and report ROI in a way that were rare in legal marketing. This enabled Ed to build his infrastructure while fulfilling needs, instituting efficiencies and raising expectations.

Ed hired senior professionals to become the lawyers’ personal strategists and coaches on marketing, business development and client service programs. They work with business intelligence research professionals to create client-specific plans, and support the attorneys on proposal efforts, sales presentations and follow up. Duane Morris’ in-house creative teams handle all aspects of the firm’s multimedia and printed collateral development, Web design and direct mail services. Most importantly, all of these professionals work in concert to qualify and evaluate every potential project, ensuring that the resources are utilized appropriately and efficiently, always focusing on ROI.

With more than 40 professional marketers working with 600+ attorneys, the firm’s ratio of marketers to lawyers is 1 to 14.5, with Ed still enticing top marketing and business development professionals to join his program (including his most recent hires from an AmLaw 100 firm and Lexis/Nexis/Martindale-Hubbell).

Ed reports directly to firm Chairman Sheldon Bonovitz, who has publicly stated that marketing is key to the firm’s financial success: “Our increase in revenue is also, in part, attributed to our marketing and business development personnel.” Bonovitz points to the firm’s ability to cross-market its practice areas, and its marketing team is critical to these efforts by putting together client teams across practices and offices, managing the details of each initiative and overseeing the dedicated budgets for each practice and industry focused group. The team-oriented, ego-suppressed, customer-centric approach to marketing and business development is paying off and permeating through the culture of the firm.

Ed’s writers and editors produce content at an astonishing rate. The firm’s use of its InterAction-based CRM technology gets the Alerts (as well as a half dozen other communications vehicles) to precisely targeted audiences of executives and decision makers. (Duane Morris also utilizes this technology to reveal to newly joining attorneys who they know in common with their new partners, creating dozens and dozens of instant introductions and business development leads.)

Duane Morris’ traditional media program is already strong — and growing stronger — with attorneys regularly quoted in legal industry and business publications, and this is attributable in large part to the efforts of Joshua Peck, the firm’s Media Relations Manager. In addition to the long list of media mentions, the firm has many attorney authors, the most prolific being Eric Sinrod, who believes his weekly columns in USA Today and elsewhere are key to his impressive book of business. (Sinrod has gained a number of his clients, including eBay and Providian, after their legal departments have contacted him directly in response to his columns.)

Harvard Business School received word of Duane Morris’ innovative approaches and made the firm the subject of a case study that will be taught this fall. (Harvard has used law firms as case study subjects only three times in the history of its program.) 

An audit of www.duanemorris.com revealed that it was “incredibly good” in terms of visitor traffic. The constantly refreshed Web site succeeds in holding the attention of its visitors, with each surfing among its 5000+ content-rich pages for an average of more than 2 minutes. The site is frequently singled out for its wealth of detailed client success stories and testimonials. The firm’s many Alerts and updates are available to news aggregators and readers via RSS feeds, and its newly launched Podcast program features professionally recorded interviews between its attorneys and other industry leaders.

Spearheading the firm’s client satisfaction program, Ed Schechter’s managers visit the firm’s top clients to identify the strengths of the legal services they receive and the areas in need of improvement. Working with the attorneys, the team swiftly addresses any issues and map out opportunities to improve or expand the relationship.

In August, an independent study by BTI research reported that Duane Morris had gained a strong foothold in the client service area. BTI interviewed 240 Corporate Counsel of Fortune 1000 companies, and the firm was singled out by name, in an unprompted manner, as a “major player” in terms of client focus, growth strategy, technology, flexible billing and value. In fact, of the 300 law firms that corporate decision-makers discussed with BTI researchers, Duane Morris was among the few that were described as truly innovative. The firm was also named as one of only 10 “market moving law firms” — firms perceived to influence the future of the legal market.