As the final court of appeal in the UK for civil cases, the Supreme Court is a powerful institution. Positioning yourself as a Supreme Court commentator will build and enhance your reputation with peers, clients and the media as someone who understands the most important legal disputes.

In 2009 I was a litigation reporter at The Lawyer responsible for covering the opening of the Supreme Court. Previously the UK’s top justices sat as the Appellate Committee of the House of Lords. The move from the House of Lords into a purpose-built court on Parliament Square was intended to emphasize the independence of the judiciary, increasing the transparency between Parliament and the Supreme Court.

It’s results season in the legal profession, that time of year when firms make it clear just how well (or not) they have performed over the last twelve months. Across the profession, lawyers will be watching to see how their competitors have fared in comparison with their own firms.

For many in law firm management, however, headline figures are a part of a broader story that they are wanting to tell. The challenge is how to communicate that story and give an accurate picture of the firm’s wider development without giving away trade secrets.

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. 

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!

How much time does your firm spend on legal directory entries?  And how does it compare to others?
 
If your firm spends under three days per entry then you are one of the speedy firms as nearly a quarter of respondents to our recent survey said it typically took them at least a whopping 10 days per entry!
 
A snap poll of 26 law firm partners and marketers who attended our recent webinar with Chambers Editor, Jonathan Rubin, found that around a quarter managed to get heir entries done in under 3 days of time, 54% spent took between four and 10 days, and 23% spent an eye watering 10-or-more day per entry.

For further results and to take part in our poll, please click here. 

Improving your ranking in a legal directory can be really beneficial to partners and their firms, so it is certainly worth investing quality time getting the best possible ranking.

Is it better to have a shop on London's Oxford Street or down a dark back alley?

For most professional firms, including commercial and private client law firms, being at the top of Google is like being on Oxford Street as 1,000s of "shoppers" will see you.

Of course this is a rhetorical question.

We all know that it's easier to sell clothes where there are crowds of people shopping for them.  If only there was an Oxford Street where prospective clients go to buy legal services.

In fact there is!  Nowadays we all look to Google to help find the solutions to our problems. 

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.

Leading exhibition organiser Prysm appoints PR agency Kelso Consulting

 Drip-drip marketing rarely delivers a flood of leads

We've just held a seminar looking at how to make professional businesses' sales pipelines work better.

Before it, our participants assisted with some research.  It showed that many of them were already doing a lot of marketing, such as events and some sort of regular technical update or newsletters.  They were for the most part pretty organised too.  

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

 What's stopping you making more of case studies?  

Case studies of your law firm's great work and delighted clients are amongst the most effective and versatile forms of marketing.

They are also amongst the cheapest forms of marketing - yet many solicitors fail to make the most out of them (and some barely have any at all).