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The German legal market is said to be the most exciting in Europe at present.
The amount of legal work is growing and international firms are showing alot of interest.
Claudia Schieblon updates readers on the situation of professional services marketing in Germany.
You will know a lot about German firms already. The international legal press reports regularly
about the large German firms - their mergers and possible future pairings. 'Merger mania' is in
full swing, not only within the home market but also from outside, with British and American firms
very interested in their German counterparts. It's not an exaggeration to say that more than half
of German law firms are thinking about a merger at present.
These are the most obvious messages coming across the channel. It shows the efforts of German
firms to offer an international service to their clients and to secure their future strategic
position. They are eager to find themselves a comfortable market position. In addition, they
are establishing a good management structure within the firm to make them more flexible and able
to continue to provide a professional work environment. They have elected managing partners and
have started to recruit staff for personnel, management and marketing.
There is a lot of competition in the market. Firms have to keep pace with the needs of their
clients for international support. The settlement of foreign firms in the major German cities
as well as the legal firms of the Big Five accountancy firms fired the fight for the more
interesting mandates. Doing an excellent job is not enough any more. You need to find your
place in the legal market of the future and work straight ahead towards it - with the support
of any marketing tools that you can use.
About 18 months ago firms started to hire qualified marketing staff. If you look back a year,
there were just a handful of legal marketers. Now there are nearly 30 people working in-house.
Ten of them are members of the business development team of Clifford Chance Punder. Other firms
started with one or two people, but there are still top ten firms without any marketing professionals
at all and where partners are kept busy handling all the marketing work.
The firms taking marketing seriously have made huge progress. Reading the firms' professional
announcements or presentations at job fairs you notice the colourful eye-catching and professional
slogans taking over from the great blocks of black and white text which was used previously.
"Meanwhile law firms are getting to the same level as firms working in the consumer goods industry -
although they are not there yet." says Ms Schwaderer, marketing manager of Freshfields Deringer.
Ms Ipfelkopfer, marketing manager at BBLP Beiten Burkhardt Mittl & Wegener is happy: "Lawyers come
and talk about their work. They are interested to see if I can use it for any marketing activities."
She feels supported in her role: "As I am working very closely with the managing partner you can make
a lot things happen."
This is not however always the case. It is not an easy job working as the first marketing manager
within a firm. Marketers start enthusiastically but meet some difficult situations. There might be
no job description - or a very brief one - but huge expectations of what they should be doing.
When they work alone they are in charge of internal and external communication, press releases,
directory entries, job fairs, events and also dealing with the agencies employed by the firm.
To become successful, they need to be multi-talented and continuously updated about the firms
goals as well as the work that the fee earners are actually doing. Marketers work hard at being
accepted. What they need is a strong partner at their side - this may make life a little easier.
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They also need stamina. Ms Lugge, who works in marketing for Bruckhaus Westrick Heller Loeber,
comments "The projects you work on are invariably long term. It takes a while for the results
to be evident."
When looking for trendsetters in legal marketing in Germany over the last few years, you would have
to mention Punder, Volhard, Weber & Axster. Following their merger with Clifford Chance and
Roger & Wells, they seem to have found the right partner to continue in that way. They were the
first German law firm to publish full page ads in the major German newspapers announcing their merger,
with the 'Law3' campaign. Ms Hoogklimmer, head of business development, reports: "One of our major
clients, DeutscheTelecom, called to say that they were about to use the same idea for their marketing
campaign with T3, but that we had been quicker. Fortunately they were not angry but were actually
happy about it because it showed them how like-minded we are." Clifford Chance Punder also published
a brochure, which does not contain what was thought to be the 'must-haves' in any firm publicity
material - the firm's history, work and lawyers' CVs. It uses the power of words and design -
the way the brochure looks is as important as what it says. "We want to show that our merged
firm is creating something totally new. This is also reflected in our brochure. We would rather
communicate our firm's values which determine how the client will feel when advised by us than
listing information which you can easily find on the web anyway," she says.
Haarman Hemmelrath & Partner recently won an award for the best law firm website, announced
by a German legal publishing company (www.hhp.de). German law firms no longer see their website as
simply a brochure on the inernet, but are starting to use technology to communicate as far as they
are allowed to by their regulatory body, eg. It is forbidden by the German Bar to have a guestbook
on your site.
The local bar rules are still a major hinderance to the firm's active marketing. They were changed
in the spring of 1997 enabling firms to communicate more actively with the market and to present
the firm's services. But there are still a lot of regulations on their marketing activities which
differ from bar to bar. Some challenge statements about the quality of a firm's work as it is often
impossible to prove them. Others prohibit direct mailing to companies who are not already clients
of the firm. So marketers have to consider confrontations with a local bar. In any other sector
a firm might go ahead and be fined if the marketing activity they want to use is likely to generate
a lot of publicity. However, in the professional services sector, a firm cannot afford any negative
publicity which might give the clients a bad impression of them.
In the November PM Forum meeting in Frankfurt, Jolene Overbeck, director of business development
of Latham & Watkins, described the development of professional marketing in the US. It took them
17 years to establish marketing as a strategic tool within professional services firms. However
German law firms will have to develop faster. Some of them act on a high level already. Others
need another year or so until they see themselves as professional firms offering legal services
to their clients and using marketing as one of the tools in their management bags.
Claudia Schieblon
Leitung PMN
Marketing für Anwaltskanzleien
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