Brand proposition: Developing and launching Access Legal

Judith Dorkins shares her experiences in developing and launching Shoosmiths’ consumer brand, Access Legal

 

Key takeaway points:

1. Test internal preconceptions and engage with clients to develop your core proposition.
2. Look afresh at everything the firm does – including individual roles and processes – from the perspective of clients.
3. Provide cover for the people who are key to the success of the project so that they can devote sufficient time to it.
4. Form a steering committee to resolve any issues which the working parties are unable to agree upon.
5. Regularly communicate developments to reassure any who may be wavering in their support of the project.
6. Develop a sizeable team of regular contributors to improve the website’s search engine optimisation.

 

When we launched our consumer arm Access Legal from Shoosmiths back in February 2010, I knew that it would take some time before the new brand acquired any sort of currency. Indeed, it was only after about a year that it began to resonate with those it is aimed at – the people on the street who would one day need access to legal services.

We had always offered consumer legal services, but wanted to wrap them up in a new, standalone brand to differentiate them from the commercial services offered under the 166-year-old Shoosmiths name.

Access Legal is an umbrella for more than 100 services under seven headings:

1.     conveyancing;
2.     employment law;
3.     legal disputes;
4.     medical negligence;
5.     motoring law;
6.     personal injury; and
7.     wills, family and wealth.

Being able to split them out meant complete freedom to market the likes of our personal injury, conveyancing and medical negligence specialisms without having to worry any longer about whether that marketing activity affects the commercial side of the business.

Pre-new brand, there were some on the commercial side who, quite justifiably, were concerned that pushing areas like personal injury made certain clients a little uncomfortable, because they did not want ‘their’ law firm to be known for that type of work.

The advent of Access Legal has swept away many of those fears, because the commercial lawyers can now see our consumer legal services as clearly demarcated. Crucially for them, so can their clients. It is probably the most significant impact the new brand has had on the firm as a whole.

That, in turn, has let the consumer side off the leash, so that it can market itself properly and more effectively to the general public, primarily via a from-the-ground-up and user-friendly website developed in house, but also through online advertising, direct marketing, newspaper campaigns and public relations.

Interestingly, it has also meant we can now package our consumer products in a way which is attractive to our commercial clients and so deliver benefits to them as well.

This new, more targeted marketing has enabled individual teams to get their message across more effectively. For example, the employment team has been able to build a substantial employee advice practice. Instructions in January 2011 increased five-fold from those in January 2010, just before the new brand was launched.

Part of our proposition is to offer lots of free advice to enable us to engage with potential new clients. Our new dedicated telephone helpline is now dealing with over 1,000 calls and emails a month and the number of website enquiries has more than doubled. Because we have worked hard on search engine optimisation, consumers seeking legal services can now find us on the first and second pages of search engines such as Google.

While we will always want new clients, we are not on a headlong rush for only new clients. Keeping our promises to existing clients of high service standards appears to be reaping its own rewards.

In the first six months post-launch, an average of 20 per cent of business came from existing/past clients and recommendations; this rose to 39 per cent in the second six months post-launch. That would not have happened if we had not delivered what we said we would.

Clients tell us, too, that they want a lifetime relationship with a law firm, and this is something we have been focusing upon. The new brand has enabled us to explain the range of services we offer more clearly so that clients have begun to better recognise that we can help them with all of their legal needs, rather than just the one service they sought at the beginning.

The brand journey has also helped our own people to understand our range of products better so that our statistics on returning clients reflect much more successful cross-selling than we had ever achieved in the past.

All of these things we believe will be given a helping hand by the upcoming arrival of alternative business structures, which will herald a new-look consumer legal services landscape in England.

 

Creating a new brand identity

We had a plan and knew that on occasion we would have to deviate from it if we were to reach our goal of creating a new consumer brand identity. But we were not always prepared for the ways in which we would have to get around certain problems.

 

Research

Before we did anything, we set out on a detailed fact-finding and investigative mission. This was important because it not only saved us time and effort later on, but it also tested our assumptions and forced us to fully engage with clients. This in turn helped us to understand what they thought about lawyers, what we did and how we did it.

Crucially, our findings changed a number of well-entrenched internal preconceptions and helped us to build our core proposition, which is now the cornerstone of the brand.

Access Legal is about being there for clients, not just to advise them on a single issue, but throughout their lifetimes, giving them legal advice that they come to trust at all those moments that they require it.

 

Time

We set a very ambitious one-year timetable to deliver the new brand. To tackle such a major project in that time, we acknowledged that those people most vital to its success would have to be pulled away from other – often equally important – things they were working on for long periods.

So, it was essential that they were given covering support during that time. We needed them and they had to be fully focused on the project if we were to achieve the best results. This also enabled us to ensure progress was not hampered by delays in decision making.

 

Project management

Applying basic project management techniques helped to provide us with a structure. For example, forming a steering committee gave us a forum in which to resolve issues that the working parties were unable to agree upon.

It was vital, too, that dependencies were fully understood in order that the right things got done and in the right order.

 

Cultural change

There is no denying the fact that not everyone at the firm was convinced that there needed to be a separate consumer brand, but we had to be patient and have the courage of our convictions. We knew that it would take time to get some of the doubters on board, while accepting that some would never quite fully come around to the idea of Access Legal.

What was hugely pleasing though and proved that what we were doing was absolutely the right thing was seeing those who had viewed the project with scepticism gradually come around once they could see the fruits of all the hard work being done. And it was moments like those that gave the team the energy and encouragement to press on.

Creating the brand ourselves only helped with this. As it took shape, people became increasingly proud and excited about their new-look business and what it stands for. That has been a vital factor in our success since the launch.

 

Communication

On a big project like this, you should not underestimate the time that you will need to invest in good communication to keep people on board and motivated.

There were times when some of the people we thought were fully behind the project wobbled slightly. These people were not only crucial to the success of what we were doing, but were acting as advocates of the new brand across the firm.

To stop their wobble, we had to reassure any who were wavering that a complex process such as this cannot happen overnight and that patience would be rewarded. It was a message we had to repeat throughout the project.

 

Changing the collective mindset

Our new brand is not just about the visuals but, importantly, about what we do and how we do it, and we had to start by making sure we explained this. We had already received great accolades from our clients but we also wanted our people to do more.

We asked our people to examine everything we do – including their roles and the processes that go with it – and then look at it afresh from the perspective of clients. We encouraged them to ask questions a client might ask, such as:

• What can Access Legal offer me that other law firms can’t? 
• Will I be able to contact you easily and quickly?
• Will you communicate with me in a way that’s easily understood?

This has made us change some processes we used to think were fine. Having done that, we can now answer these types of client questions on our website and in other marketing activities.

These are the very issues that clients told us are extremely important to them in choosing a law firm when faced with a legal issue, whether it is an everyday matter such as selling a house, or a life-changing catastrophic injury. Undoubtedly, consistently putting ourselves in clients’ mindsets in every area of our activity was a big shift for us.

 

Website

We made the decision at the outset to put our in-house creative and IT resources to use and build the website from scratch so that we could have total control and flexibility and get it to do exactly what we wanted. In addition, once it was up and running, our intimate knowledge of the website and how it works would make maintaining it and keeping it up to date much easier.

Where we did seek outside help was with search engine optimisation (SEO). After all, there is no point in having a beautiful new website packed with informative and unique content if no one is visiting it.

So, we brought on board an SEO expert who has helped us to ensure web content is written in such a way that it presses consumers’ buttons and, where possible – and without sounding contrived – contains the exact phrases that people might type into a search engine.

We subsequently found that we had a ravenous beast of a website that demanded being fed with fresh new content every day, which presented another challenge: who would provide it? It had to come from the lawyers and legal advisers. After all, they are the specialists in their fields who can write about something from scratch or offer their take on a hot topic or breaking national news story.

With encouragement and guidance from our communications team, which also ensures all copy fits within our house style and strikes the right tone, we now have a big team of regular and enthusiastic contributors. They are motivated to continue writing when they see their material being picked up by other websites or, even better, attracting interest from journalists searching for information and expertise on a particular issue.

We knew – because our SEO people kept telling us – that it would take a year or so to get Access Legal up the search engine rankings, and they were right. Our content is now regularly finding its way onto the first and second pages of Google searches, which is no mean feat, having started from scratch.

 

A long road

From initial concept to planning, implementation and continuing development, establishing our new brand has been a long and sometimes difficult road.

A good deal of patience, faith in what we were doing and commitment to deliver on our promises to the numerous clients we are attracting and holding onto proves beyond doubt that it was the right thing to do.

The energy and enthusiasm our new brand has created both internally and in the wider community has been a huge reward to everyone who made this happen and bodes well for the exciting future ahead.