A recent post on the Legal Marketing Association‘s listserv included a link to an article titled “Explaining the Value of Content to Marketing Dinosaurs.”
The article provides great advice on convincing those who still think about and expect to use marketing techniques developed in the dark ages — that is, the age before the Internet. The article came from King Content, an Australian company.
The Aussies have been on the cutting edge of law firm content curation for years. They have long been leaders in knowledge management, categorizing law firms’ intellectual capital in ways that make it useful to both the lawyers as well as their clients. Their practices speed the delivery of services and reduce costs using methods that U.S. firms are just now being pressured to do.
These Australian firms (including, for example, Cooper Grace Ward in Brisbane, which has written about “Knowledge Management in the Legal Profession“) use technology platforms, social media best practices, knowledge transfer and retention and precedents management. They use these methods to reduce their costs and time to delivery of work product in ways that allow them to manage client demands for alternative fee arrangements and highlight the importance of managing knowledge. As a result, they ensure a competitive edge in a market where “shopping legal services and comparisons to firms” are becoming more common.
U.S. firms have much to learn about how these foreign firms have used content to develop a law firm practice model that places them in a competitive advantage. Marrying firm-developed content with news and references to other sources of information on a subject is crucial to the long-term success of firms that need to differentiate themselves in the highly competitive global legal markets.