Category Archives: Legal Marketing

How Far Have We Come

Posted on by Elonide Semmes
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Some years ago I gave a tongue and cheek speech at a law firm retreat on the history of legal marketing as seen by those of us in the trenches. Recently when a new legal marketer seemed frustrated about partners not willing to be on LinkedIn, I assured her that we’ve actually made progress. So we’ve decided to actually pull out the time capsule and share our 30-years of war stories from here at Right Hat. So stay tuned for the Right Hat documentary!

1980 I can’t believe they want us to carry a business card? Everyone at my country club knows who I am and what I do.
1984 Clients push back on phone and fax charges
1986 Firm brochure just published crisp A-Z (antitrust – zoning) 60 pages
1989 Logo for a law firm?? You won’t see Cravath stooping that low.
1995 Web page – cost $10,000 but buried it as IT expense.

And that is just the start…..

The Death of the Pixel

Posted on by Jeff Yerkey
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Hoist your glasses to a trusted companion! He disappeared at the youthful age of 28. Not Hendrix, not Winehouse, but… the pixel.

Largely born in the 1980s desktop publishing revolution with the first 1984 Mac computer, the pixel was at birth very declarative: he was either on or off. Very quickly he grew to 16 shades of gray and later became a rebel, waving 256 colors and finally matured into 16 million colors.

Two weeks ago, his “parents” at Apple effectively killed him with the launch of the MacBook Pro Retina display laptop, that jaw-droppingly beautiful notebook with 2-1/2 times the number of pixels of that 50-inch HDTV in your living room.

Birth of the High-Resolution Web

With the new MacBook Pro Retina laptop (technology also found in the new iPad, Android phones and the iPhone 4S), the pixels are now sooo small, so teeny, that we can no longer design around them. Web practices like creating a web page at 1024 x 768, or creating a 2″ x 2″ banner ad, and anything that used to be WYSIWYG are all going to be obsolete in the future.

Retina Mac early adopters are already complaining that websites which were created using standard size graphics and images (that would be 99.999% of all current websites) look fuzzy on these new devices. You can’t take little images and icons and just blow them up as Apple’s new flagship is doing. They get blurry and jaggy.

How can you plan for and design around something you can’t see?  The short answer is you need a new web toolkit (and vernacular) to create new high-rez friendly websites. The good news is the geeks (hey, I count myself as an honorary subject in their unruly legion) are already on it.

Quashing Fuzzy Web Graphics: “Retina” Graphics Primer

Following are three tips, technologies and best practices you’ll need to think about before embarking on creating your next website.

1) Kick the Pixel Habit.  This will be the hardest one for designers — we all love our Photoshop images. By learning about new web image technologies like SVG (scalable vector graphics), web designers need not rely on JPEG and GIFs of things like arrows, charts and smooth headers. The current problem with the SVG file format is that not every web browser supports it. Most modern browsers do, but Internet Explorer 8 and below, and Android 2.3 do not.

2) Icon Fonts. This is the tech that has us jazzed at Right Hat. Icon fonts take small line graphics like arrows, icons and so on, and embed them into CSS3-compliant web page code. Awesome. Icon fonts  successfully avoid many of the backwards-browser issues that SVG faces.

3) Responsive Images. While the two technologies above deal with line art and icons, dealing with photos is more complicated. Retina-ready images should be treated “responsively”, that is to say your images will need to be four times the size they are currently. (While this is frequently referred to as 2X images, it is in reality 4 times the number of pixels). There are currently several web developer “hacks” and discussions about how to best deal with higher rez images, so talk with your developer about the best plan.

One image downside: if you have a practice of purchasing royalty-free images in the smaller “web” image sizes, that won’t cut it in RetinaLand.  High resolution-frindly websites mean higher image budgets.

What can you do to get ready for the emerging presence of high rez laptops and iPads? For starters, monitor your web logs and visitors’ screen resolutions.  At the sky high prices of these Apple products, it will take a while for these stats to register. However, once the Retina resolution stats approach double digits, it’s time to start reformulating your graphics approach using these new technologies.

The good news is that there is nothing in these new high-resolution computer and tablet screens that’s going to break your current site. I’m sure the folks with more-money-than-God who can afford the new MacBook Pro Retina are already getting used to fuzzy graphics.

But the high-resolution future is coming. That much is clear.

UPDATE: 11 July 2012:  Thomas Fuchs has put up a nice PDF on how to “retinafy” your site. (Tip of hat to Daring Fireball)

Why Thought Leadership Works

Posted on by Elonide Semmes
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Business development is about building relationships over time. And part of the challenge is maintaining a meaningful dialogue with your prospects.  One tried and true way to keep the conversation going is to offer up something that prospects can get without actually hiring you. An offer gives them a chance to experience your thinking and expertise without the scarier commitment of saying, “yes.”

So make sure your marketing approach includes enough offers to create a dialogue. These offers can take many forms such as white papers, surveys, blogs and seminars. Each offer must include content that adds value and drives a prospect to want to learn more. And remember these offers don’t have to be long or particularly complicated to be effective. Just think of the popularity of any type of “Top 10″list in a magazine or newspaper.

Calling a Spade a Spade

Posted on by Elonide Semmes
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Aric Press, editor of The American Lawyer, wrote a great piece today in the AmLaw Daily called “In-House at the American Lawyer.” It is sobering and honest look at what faces many law firms as we close out 2009. Of course, I liked the fact he put in a plug for increased marketing. But most important I think Aric shines a light on the real need for innovation and fresh ideas.

Acritas’ Shines Light on Top Legal Brands

Posted on by Elonide Semmes
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Acritas, a leading provider of research in the UK, Europe and the US, provided an insightful glimpse last night into what’s on the mind of global elite buyers of legal services. The final study will incorporate  1,000 interviews of an impressive cast of companies. The survey participants include public and private companies in all of the major rankings and stock indices including Forbes, Fortune 1000, FT 500 US, NASDAQ 100, NYSE Composite, AMEX 100, Dow 30 and the S&P 500.

The study will be a cold bucket of water for many major law firms. But bottom line it is information any savvy marketer would want to have at their fingertips. It can help you understand your competitive set and know how your firm is perceived. The amount of data that can be drilled down and analyzed is impressive.