Hellerman Communications is honored to be the sponsor of the 2019 Legal Sales & Service Awards. Recently, John Hellerman spoke with past award winner Helena Lawrence of Orrick in order to glean the key elements of her firm’s winning initiatives and the secrets of their success. Here is what he discovered: Listen here!
Helena Lawrence, Senior Marketing & Business Development Manager, Orrick: Cyber, Privacy & Data Innovation
Created within the perfect storm of market need and internal dynamics, Orrick’s GDPR Readiness Assessment Tool hit the market just right.
“As an innovator in the delivery of client service, we are continually looking for new ways to make the law accessible – productizing legal services is one way to deliver value,” explained Helena. “Given our global privacy practice with lawyers on the ground across Europe, we knew transformative privacy regulatory change was coming, and one of our key partners, Kolvin Stone in our London office, had created a resource to help our clients prepare. When he shared it with me, I immediately thought: ‘we should automate this!’”
“The feedback was immediate and positive,” said Helena. “Partners praised the launch materials and mentioned how easy we’d made it for them to communicate with their clients; clients appreciated the usefulness of the tool and spoke highly of it to the partners…it couldn’t have gone better.”
Automate it they did, and its success can be measured in numerous ways: awards won, including a 2018 LSSO award, sustained media attention touting the tool and underscoring the firm’s brand for innovation, partner engagement, a plethora of client praise, and of course, significant new business from both existing clients and new ones. Most useful to the firm’s BD, marketing, and IT support teams, the success of the GDPR tool has inspired additional products and services. “The firm has a sales culture,” noted Helena. “But the success of the GDPR Assessment tool has definitely inspired other projects and made it easier to sell creative new campaigns – versus random acts of marketing – to our partners.”
After automating the questionnaire for eventual distribution to clients, and to insure its success, the firm took great care collaborating across multiple internal departments and teams to roll it out properly. For instance, the firm used the entire summer of 2017 to pilot the tool by reaching out to its current clients seeking their feedback. As Helena explained, the general message was: ‘You’re a valued client. Please try our tool and give us feedback.”
The launch was orchestrated globally on go-day with a 9:00am ET internal email to partners, which included materials and templates for partners to share with their clients, a press release, an embargoed article which was posted to the firm’s website, and a robust social media campaign. “The feedback was immediate and positive,” said Helena. “Partners praised the launch materials and mentioned how easy we’d made it for them to communicate with their clients; clients appreciated the usefulness of the tool and spoke highly of it to the partners…it couldn’t have gone better.”
With such detailed planning little was left to chance, but that didn’t mean there weren’t surprises. The most significant being the media attention. “We expected two to four earned stories over the course of the campaign,” said Helena. “But by compliance day in May 2018, we had received more than 35 placements on three continents in a variety of formats: features, round-ups, quotes, blogs, articles and podcasts. There was a variety of interest and it still generates mentions,” she added.
When asked about the value of LSSO to a firm with a sales culture as sophisticated and developed as Orrick’s, Helena was quick with an answer: “If you think about the sales funnel and how data and analytics have enabled law firms to sell with much more precision, organizations like LSSO are critical to help focus the industry discussion and promote best practices.”