Differentiating legal brands is well understood to be really hard to do. Of course, you have a great culture. Of course, you are client-centric...

For Reed Smith, their conversations with clients & staff came back strongly that they were seen as straightforward and did not over-complicate issues. Even competitors said that they were ‘great to have on the other side'. Their tagline is ‘Driving Progress’ to embody this. 

The key thing, says Sadie Baron, is to be brave - if you aren’t, your brand statement will likely be a bit meaningless - and it will not provide your lawyers with a clear brand asset. 

From their side, lawyers also need to understand that the brand is an asset and that they are part of that. They must nurture it, so they need to understand it and buy in. 

From that point forward, the content from the lawyers should be authentic & uncomplicated. You are then looking for an infrastructure from the marketing team that the lawyers can work with to ‘help them be humans’ in their digital presence. 

As Sadie put it “have an opinion, please!"

In terms of the topics, one final nugget from her:

“Concentrate on your 5 key clients and you will get a long way [to a coherent content strategy for each sector or team]”

As she concluded: Everybody benefits if you get it right.