One of our most visited blogs over the past few years discusses five ways for law firm's to improve their relationship with their Public Relations agency.

We have recently updated it ... although not by much as its advice has "stood the test of time".

Click here for our new and improved "5 ways to get more from your law firm's PR agency".

If you are looking at your relationship with your PR agency,  you may also be interested in another of our blogs, which has each year been our most read blog since it was written about three years ago!

Kelso Consulting has a full programme of webinars on reputation-building issues for Autumn 2019, including many specifically for the legal sector.

These include:

September - Getting your law firm in the national media

September - Getting your thought leadership right in Autumn 2019 & beyond

October - Ensuring your LawTech stands out in the legal sector

November - Successful blogging for law firms

Presenting will be Kelso's Tim Prizeman (who has been advising law firms for 20+ years continuously) and Katy Dowell (former news editor at The Lawyer magazine).

While working on The Lawyer newsdesk it was not uncommon for partners to complain to me that the press release they had spent weeks perfecting was not featured in the news. Getting noticed by the legal press is a challenge, so how do you stand out from the crowd?

But calling a journalist to complain is not going to help your cause. I have worked with many reporters who, after receiving an aggressive call from a lawyer demanding that their release be published, simply stopped looking at any future news from the firm whether it merited attention or not.

Instead, it is worthwhile looking at how you might do things differently and better the next time round.

While legal technology developments would once have been dismissed as ‘boring’ by the legal press, it is now starting to gain traction as firms start embracing new technologies. For legal PRs this is a challenging situation: a story that might have been rejected because there wasn’t enough interest is now rejected because there is too much such news!

How do you ensure your legal technology news is making your firm stand out from the crowd and delivering the right message to the right audience? 

Dealing with the legal press needn’t be difficult: just have something interesting to say

It is no exaggeration to say that in my time on The Lawyer news desk I dealt with hundreds of PRs and many thousands of press releases. Filtering the good, the bad and the ugly was a daily chore.  Only the chosen few would succeed in grabbing my attention and, just perhaps, end up being published as a story on TheLawyer.com. 

Over the years I developed strong relations with PRs and the firms they represented. Yet there were times that dealing with a press team could be frustrating. 
Answering 15 calls on the same irrelevant subject in the space of two hours was tedious, my ears would become deaf to it. 

Here is what you really need to know (but most PR guides don't cover)!

You've heard about the power of media, maybe your competitors are getting great coverage or perhaps you have a partner with a big ego who wants lots of press coverage. Either way, you have been tasked with getting lots for your practice, but neither you nor the partners have done it before.

That's not a problem as everyone has to start somewhere. But many law firm partners and their marketing managers approach media relations with fundamental misunderstandings and unrealistic expectations which, at the very least, lead to missed opportunities and often mess the whole thing up.

Many law firms have great relationships with their PR agencies.  Indeed some have PR advisors who they've stuck with not just for years, but in some cases for decades.

We also know from our discussions with numerous law firms that this sadly isn't always the case.  Sometimes there are faults on both sides, sometimes there are faults just on one side... and sometimes its nobody's fault - one party simply no longer matches the other.

In the later case, the best thing to do is to have an open discussion and move on. However, in the other circumstances, there's lots that can be done to nip such problems in the bud and restore the relationship.

Getting the most out of your law firm's Public Relations agency

I recently had an interesting and wide ranging discussion with Peter Scott (www.peterscottconsult.co.uk) who advises numerous law firms on strategy and management issues. Having previously run Eversheds for eight years as managing partner, he's certainly got great insights to share.

One of the questions I frequently get asked is "which is best, retainer or project when working with a PR agency?"

Both and neither! It all depends what you want the agency to do.  So, as Harry Hill used to say on his TV Burp! there's only one way to sort it out... fight!

This "must read" legal exchange on the Taylor Swift alt-right ding-dong is most illuminating

It is very rare that letters from lawyers enter the "must read" category, so it is not lightly that I recommend the retort to Taylor Swift's expensive law firm Venable LLP from the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union).

Do you read the regular advice comments from John Timpson, the chairman of high street cobbler and key cutter Timpsons?

They appear in the Telegraph and elsewhere, and I am a big fan of his sensible advice for growing and managing a business... and given how ubiqtuous his firm is on Britain's high street, he has a track record of success to back up his advice.

Recently, in his column he dealt with a question about whether a firm should start doing press and PR activity to generate customers.

It is a question many law firms' partners have asked.  At big firms it is a resounding "yes",

A while ago I penned a white paper entitled "Why some companies turn a crisis into a PR disaster .... and how not to be one of them" based on then recent cases such as Toyota.

The main point was that such disasters typically don't come out of the blue and the effective PR tactics for handling them are well known.

Yet experienced and competent CEOs and their management teams had been able to create a PR disaster of far greater magnitude through inept handling of the communications issues.

I revisited the paper in the light of the recent sad case involving Thomas Cook and its handling of the publicity around the recent inquest into the deaths of two children while holidaying in Corfu a few years ago. I won't be changing the white paper as Thomas Cook also exhibited all the wrong-headed management thinking it warns against.

Are you locked in a death spiral with your PR agency?
 
We often come across professional firms who have previously been sucked into the "PR death spiral" with their agency (and in-house too).  Here's how to recognise it:

By contrast to the disastrous end, it all began so positively.

A new PR team had arrived, and make lots of sensible-sounding requests for articles, materials and other content from the partners to pump prime the campaign.  It is quickly supplied by partners keen for coverage and wanting to play their part in a successful campaign.  It is a great start and hopes are high.

Leading exhibition organiser Prysm appoints PR agency Kelso Consulting

PR campaign to create national press coverage for professional negligence law specialists

Solicitors NeglectAssist, one of the UK’s leading specialists in negligence law, has appointed Kelso Consulting to help it secure prominent coverage in the national media – particularly their personal finance sections.

NeglectAssist, a trading name of Wixted & Co, one of the pioneers of “no win, now fee” arrangements in the professional negligence area, acts for people who have lost large sums of money through having been mis-sold investments– often costing them much or all of their life’s savings

Marketing and PR tips for smaller law firms

Kelso Consulting's Tim Prizeman is presenting on PR & marketing for law firms at the Sole Practitioners - Practice & Profitability Conference, in December 2014. 

We're going to be adding the tips from his presentation into this blog over the next few days (so please subscribe by clicking here, and we'll email you when they are ready).