Law firms have been slow to adopt emerging digital client engagement capabilities—web, email, online communities, social and mobile—to maintain relevant, meaningful dialog with prospects and existing clients.

For more than a decade, law firms considered their websites as just another brochure, not as a way for clients to interact with the firm. They have not ventured beyond websites, newsletters and email blasts to engage with customers in a meaningful way.

The Legal industry is changing. More choices and a weaker economy have created a buyers’ market. Customers are looking to lower costs through outsourcing that is leading to loss in revenue for Law firms.

Clients are changing. Law firms cannot take their clients for granted. The buyers’ market has created competition like never before. Large anchor accounts are no longer safe. Instead of being sold to, customers drive the sales process. Customers utilize social media, thought leadership and online content to identify opportunities and make decisions on firms they engage. While its critical to build relationships, the digital medium needs to be used to help communicate value and guide customers through the decision making process.

In the midst of change, many law firms have not evolved at the same pace as their customers. Partners in law firms rarely engage marketing beyond branding activities. Clients are guarded carefully. Marketing has traditionally played a limited role in business development, sales and client engagement. Opportunities are largely identified through relationships.

Both the technology and approach to digital client engagement have changed significantly, and aside from the legal space, professional service firms have adopted digital marketing to engage with customers in a meaningful way. Marketing has tools at their disposal that can enable them to engage audiences and measure relationship engagement.

The advances in audience engagement and social media are going to alter the landscape considerably. Here’s how:

• New Client Acquisition
  • Digital marketing and social media will play a key role in helping Partners and Business Development teams acquire new customers.
• Client Engagement
  • Marketing will play a key role in providing relevant and meaningful information
  • Provide digital forums for clients to engage with
• Recruiting new talent
  • HR will leverage social media and digital communication to engage with prospects

There is  a growing awareness of the digital opportunities and continuing challenges in the adoption of these opportunities for the sales, recruiting and engagement functions amongst legal companies.

There are some common needs and challenges that can be addressed by digital engagement capabilities available in today’s software platforms:

• Client engagement is a manual process that is limited to your team’s time and availability. Beyond opportunities, customers rarely hear from Partners.
• New opportunities are identified primarily through networking. This mechanism is unreliable and cannot be the only source of new opportunities.
• Growing mid-market opportunities through manual efforts is expensive for larger firms.
• Making relevant information easily accessible to web visitors is difficult.
• Effective recruitment of lateral transfers, law students and non-legal talent is not easy.
• Showcasing partners adequately is difficult.

There are many great opportunities to address these challenges, while improving the firm’s interaction with its audience—prospects, clients, talent and the public—through all the available channels. Here are some of the ideas and opportunities:

• Web experience that drives conversion
  • Ability to respond to your audiences behavior with relevant, personalized experiences
  • Ability to enable stakeholders within your firm to create and manage their own content
  • Ability to communicate with your audience through any channel they prefer

• Firm Partner Marketing
  • Raise profile of Partners through digital marketing including social media, SEO and email. Enable lawyers and associates to manage their own web page content. Connect Partners to the outside community through the digital medium.
• Customer Engagement
  • Stop spraying and praying! Segment your customer and prospect base, and send relevant information on Cases and industry issues to the appropriate segments
  • Send clients timely alerts of breaking news through the recipients preferred channel
  • Engage clients and candidates with in relevant, two-way digital dialog through email and web
  • Use client insight from behavioral analytics to shape the website experience dynamically
  • Utilize extranets as a mechanism to not only share documents but engage in dialog
  • By capturing customer insight law firms can make better decisions on the customers and segments to target. CRM systems play a key role in this regard.
• Findability & Visibility
  • Let web visitors find what they are looking for
  • Position websites higher on search rankings
  • Ability to control the findability and search experience of your information from the web (e.g. Google, Bing, etc.) and from within your website
  • As mentioned above, promoting the partner profile online

• Social Media
  • Leverage online communities to grow relationship with target audiences
  • Utilize Twitter and Linked-in to engage in online conversations on key industry issues
  • Alumni communities are exceptional sources for hiring talent back

• Engage with Talent
  • Engage with talent through a digital dialog using email, newsletters and online communities

• Measurement
  • Strong measurement that justifies marketing’s role in customer engagement and business development and ROI.
  • Justify Marketing investment and raise Marketing profile within the firm

So how do you drive the strategic ideas mentioned above? What are the components of a digital platform that supports these capabilities?

Several digital capabilities are needed to enable the platform; typically we see the following that are required to be successful

• Web Content Management & Portal capability
• Marketing Automation
• Community Platforms
• Analytics
• Site Search

Together, these components create an enabling ecosystem of marketing, business development, attorneys, talent and human capital to drive successful customer engagement.