Attorney Lauren Currin, President of LMA, shares knowledge gained from her experience.
Here are a few stabs at how you brand your law firm…
You’re honest, compassionate, hard-working and dedicated. You care about your clients and fight to get them real results. Does that sound familiar?
It does not take a psychic, nor does it take doing deep reconnaissance on your law firm’s marketing strategy to draw this conclusion. The reason we know your branding approach is because it’s pretty much every law firm’s branding approach.
Even if you are truly a hard-working, compassionate, dedicated attorney, which many attorneys are, you aren’t setting yourself apart from your peers by using these non-descript descriptors. All you are doing is adding to the noise a potential client hears in their search for an attorney and making yourself a wallflower in an industry rampant with wallflowers.
Forget Branding for a Moment, and Let’s Talk About Your Identity
Branding implies the presentation of your business. It’s how you choose to present yourself to the world. It’s a term that implies external goals, and it’s rarely thought of as introspective process. That’s why the concept of “branding” as it is widely used fails to describe what you should actually be doing when presenting your firm to the world.
Rather than focusing solely on presentation, let’s consider who you are. What is your background? How were you raised? What cultures do you identify with? How long have you been doing what you’re doing?
The answers to these questions are what sets you apart, because they make you unique and they are true. What too many firms fail to recognize is that your uniqueness is what sets you apart.
Embracing your experience, your personality and your identity is the most powerful tool you have as an attorney.
Part of our job is reminding attorneys that their story is their greatest asset. Potential clients are going to see so many law firms saying the same things when they’re looking for an attorney. What they want to find is a real person that they can identify with.
It’s important to understand that your qualities don’t need to be those of your clients. For example, if your clients tend to be construction workers or business owners or middle class or college educated or immigrants, you might be tempted to try to brand your firm in a way that reflects the values and backgrounds of those potential clients. But is that who you are?
Don’t try to be a mind-reader and think about what clients want to hear or how you should present yourself in a way that others find appealing. Instead, be yourself.
Potential clients aren’t necessarily looking for someone who resembles them, but they are looking for someone who stands out among the endless number of firms who are describing themselves in the same way.
Your Brand is Who You Are
Attorneys – and many business owners – tend to think of their brand as a logo or a catchphrase. But branding is really just embracing who you are. When you get this essential part of branding wrong, nearly everything else you do in your outreach is also wrong, because it stems from a fundamental misrepresentation of your firm.
Don’t be discouraged if you’ve misbranded your law firm. It’s common, and it can be fixed.
Think about who you are and what you care about. That’s what you want to express with your brand. At LMA, we’ve worked with countless firms to help them articulate their identity through their brand. We can tell you from first-hand experience that it’s not only a sure-fire way to make sure you are being true to who you are, it’s also incredibly effective.
If branding is something you’ve struggled with, don’t hesitate to call our team. One of the real pleasures of our work is meeting attorneys, getting to know them and helping them express who they are through their brand.
Contact us today and let’s talk about your brand.
