Ep. 12 Law Firm Directory Submissions With Richard Pinto, Yolanda Cartusciello&Bob Robertson - a podcast by Guy Alvarez

Podcast Shownotes In this episode of the Legal Marketing 2.0 podcast, legal marketing leaders with decades of experience in the industry, provide super useful insight and advice on the process of law firm directory submissions. Chambers and Partners and The Legal 500 directories play a prominent role in the discussion. Let’s get the big question out of the way: In today’s world, do you even need a directory listing? To answer the question our esteemed guests provide a list of benefits of the submissions process that go beyond being listed and getting ranked: - Third party affirmation – You get an independent and objective look at your practice and your lawyers as compared to your peers - An opportunity for an internal practice review as you’re putting everything together to see whether or not you’re hitting your benchmarks. - The submissions process is an information hygiene exercise and provides a framework to organize your information and keep it up to date. A big frustration partners have is: a matter may have opened, there is an initial description of what was going on, and then over time, the matter progresses, then closes, and the information wasn’t updated on the firm’s website and other places. The process forces you to have the latest information. - Increased client contact opportunities since you’ll need to reach out to them to use as referees – a great opportunity for partners to keep in touch with their best clients. Clients appreciate spending time with the partner. - During the process you get market intelligence about your practice and where it stands. Firms get to see where the market sees them and how clients perceive them. - Provides a wake-up call. References may not turn out the way you anticipated. Clients you thought would be champions of the firm may provide negative feedback. This provides an opportunity to work on client relationships. - All of the effort that goes into a submission can be repurposed in other ways. The process of awards submissions is like getting on a scale. If you haven’t done all of the exercising and careful eating before you get on the scale, you can’t get mad at the scale for the number that if reflects back up to you. There’s a whole lot of work to be done before you get to the directory submission. Like raising your profile, making sure that you’ve been targeting and developing business so you have the deals and the cases that will impress the researchers, and selecting and preparing your referees. How do Legal 500 and Chambers submissions differ? A big difference is how each engages with the firm. Legal 500 is very proactive about reaching out the marketplace, meeting with the firm’s lawyers and marketers, and gaining information about the firm and practices in a personal way. The researchers generally have longer tenures, bringing with it, a wealth of knowledge about the firm. The tenure of Chambers researchers may be just as long but they tend to rotate their researchers to different practice areas, handling different parts of the book. Chambers does that deliberately to get a fresh take on a particular area of practice. Another difference is Chambers ranks many more individuals than Legal 500 which tends to focus more on teams. About our guests: Yolanda Cartusciello is a business development and marketing consultant to law firms with over 20 years of experience in the legal industry. For the past decade, Richard Pinto had been helping law firms bridge their marketing communications efforts with their Business development activities with directories and awards marketing at the core. Bob Robertson's career has touched nearly every aspect of business development and marketing for nearly every size of firm and practice areas See additional shownotes at www.good2bsocial.com

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