The Voice Search Lawyer: Using AI to Optimize for Client Conversations
The legal landscape is undergoing a revolution. In the age
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There are a number of reasons why you may not be the premier law firm in your geographical area, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your legal prowess. Your attorney group understands every aspect of the law, and the ever-changing precedents, codes, and procedures that come along with your profession. You are fantastic at what you do. Your firm has the credentials, the case studies, and the partners to prove that you are the best in the business. So why isn’t everyone using your firm for their legal needs? There are a number of reasons why you may not be the premier law firm in your geographical area, and it has absolutely nothing to do with your legal prowess. Unbeknownst to you, the firm’s brand may be turning prospective clients away, simply through irrelevance. It becomes frustrating, because you may not be doing anything that particularly harms your brand. But you also may not be doing anything to help it either. The core issue is, something is lacking from point A, you being an attorney, to point B, clients not beating down your door to reap the benefits of your expertise. What’s the problem? The good news is, you are trying to determine where the disconnect lay. Even if you are not marketing savvy, it isn’t hard to understand that your billings aren’t exactly causing your accounting department to clock overtime. If you look closer, you may determine the answer extends to your firm’s brand or lacking brand identity. Determining whether your law firm is due for a rebranding campaign can be accomplished in a few short steps. But, first, you must understand exactly what a “Brand” is, and how it affects your business growth. 
According to Vendasta, a marketing firm with a local concentration, the star rating is the number one factor used by prospective clients to judge a business. How many stars does your firm have on Yelp, Facebook or legal review sites? These ratings matter incredibly to your livelihood and the brand that travels with your public perception. It is time to find answers.
The complication of remaining relevant in the legal industry takes work, and it is completely understandable that you – an attorney – do not have the time to do it. Remember when building a web presence provided the luxury of being found near and wide, with a single search? Those days are long gone, and every attorney reading this knows that to be true. The complication of remaining relevant in the legal industry takes work, and it is completely understandable that you – an attorney – do not have the time to do it.
Creating substance through renewed branding efforts signals to your target market that you take your work seriously, and you can be trusted to handle their case in the same significant light. Rebranding allows your firm to keep up in the community, and enjoy the one thing all firms require to be successful: Top of mind awareness. You want to be first. You want to be the go-to attorney in your legal focus. Rebranding can help accomplish that goal.
Creating Substance
A new logo does not create a new brand. A new website design does not create a new brand. A new brand enhances your clients’ experiences, and that is what you are accomplishing with a refreshed approach. Before you can rebrand your existing firm, you must understand where you are failing as a brand now.
Failing brands can be attributed to: This rebrand, the moment you begin discussing it, is all encompassing and includes a new outlook and new participation before the physical components of change even come into play.
Positioning your company for rebranding includes building a clear proposal for identifying your target audience and how you are going to promote your services to meet their needs.
Take a close look at your competition to understand how your image and theirs are similar. Mid-market law firms often create homogenized looks that lack differentiation. If the public cannot tell the difference between your firm and one down the hall (street, or even a city over) from you, why should they choose you over your competitor?
Examining your brand against your competitor’s is a sobering experience, which is why everyone in the firm should be involved in understanding how important your actual position is in the community.
If you cannot distinguish the differentiating factors between you and the competition, you do not have a position to build from, and you must start there – now.
Next, create a promise that your brand will fulfill. In legal terms, you can’t promise to win a case “or get your money back!” However, there are significant approaches to “selling” a reason to believe in your position. Working on a contingency basis is a very popular approach in the legal industry, but it has also been adopted by most firms already – so you aren’t any different by offering the “If we don’t win, you don’t pay” approach.
Promises in character, customer service, and availability can deliver the difference between your firm and your competition. Evaluate your competition closely, and frequently. This will allow you to maintain effective positional promises that evolve with your firm, instead of working against your principles and meshing into the same offerings of the other firms nearby. This can be accomplished with a positioning statement.
Once you craft a positioning statement that you can stand behind fully, honestly and effectively, you can move on to reflecting that statement in your firm’s behavior. This will be the statement that you, and your employees, begin the work day practicing.
Rebranding provides a fresh approach to company behaviors, policies, and administrations. While you are busy representing your clients in the courtroom, your office will be busy upholding your new commitment to quality, professionalism, and client focus.
These behaviors begin with the attitude of the person answering the phone and progress to the time it takes to return the message left from the call. It extends into every communication effort thereafter and is followed by a commitment to satisfy the client’s needs based on your new positioning statement.
Attorneys provide a service, which means the satisfaction level is dependent on the firm’s interaction with its clients. This achievement is now measured in the reviews the firm receives online, which is a marketing tool for future clients to explore. The connection between the attitude of your receptionist to the accuracy of your billing practices and the advice that is administered during consultations is the compilation of bottom line results.
This aggregate of components to your firm’s success only underscores the importance of everyone understanding the company’s position and putting it into practice successfully.
The equity involved in rebranding your firm is tangible. The attitude and commitment that goes along with your cultural overhaul, resulting from the top down changes for the better are too, even though you cannot put them in a box or weigh them physically. Rebranding isn’t just about changing. It’s about building a better brand than the one you had before. If there is a magic formula for rebranding, whoever has it could be a billionaire upon releasing it. If we had to put it into an equation, care and quality control would be the top two elements behind the process. Rebranding your firm will take time, and should happen with both care and quality control in mind at all times. Stripping the paint off the walls will not change the attitudes around the office. Getting a new logo will not suddenly make your attorneys friendlier and exceptionally responsive. The majority of the changes rebranding will drive is 80% behind the scenes. They go completely unseen by the populace because they are cultural. These changes translate into trust, commitment, and quality, which develop client relationships that last. BrandExtract declares, “It is important to have the entire team on board with a rebrand. The purpose must be clear, and the communication concise, otherwise you are wasting a lot of time, effort and money. Then, what’s it all for?” This does not mean that your visual communications should not evolve with your rebranding efforts. Make a list of everything that has your logo on it, from email correspondences to signage and websites to directories and implement a plan to update the brand accordingly for each. This, too, will take time, and requires a focus from your external marketing partners.
Plan a meeting with each marketing representative that has a hand in your firm’s applications. Everyone from your designer to your online marketing group, and explain the cultural changes you are embarking on. These professionals will help you build a plan to create a consolidated and rational approach to rebranding your materials.
Solutions take time but begin with clarity and focus. Creating a strategy to rebrand your firm will take work, but it will deliver results. Start the process by meeting with your partners, office employees and even contract workings, where applicable. Talk to courtroom employees, marketing partners, and even community activists to understand what they think about when your company’s name is mentioned. Honesty is not only the best policy, it is the only policy when it comes to rebranding. If you don’t know what’s broken, you certainly cannot fix it. Solicit real comments and concerns from your clients, partners and the public. You may not like what you hear, but you have to understand where you are falling short. Before even thinking about making a design change, take the time to understand the following: