Clients of professional services firms are fundamentally buying the knowledge and capability of people.

Showing who those people are, what they know and how they can help is fundamental to successfully marketing a firm. Hence keeping biographies and directory submissions up to date is a high priority for leading law firms. 

Although when you look at very large and successful firms, they very rarely are able to showcase the bio pages of their people. When you look at the big 4 firms (often seen as the benchmark other professional services firms compare themselves to), they essentially have no bio pages at all in the UK. This is very likely because keeping the biographies of 20,000 people up to date is too huge a task for even a very large marketing function. 

Scale, it seems, makes demonstrating a firm's most compelling assets very difficult.

Yet LinkedIn holds the bios of millions of professionals, nearly half a million from Deloitte alone. And it costs Deloitte nothing to build or maintain. 

Being self-service allows LinkedIn to avoid the cost and bottlenecks of a traditional biography process. It allows professionals to create and update their own biographies. 

But, of course, LinkedIn is not a solution built for firms; it has it's own priorities. As a result, it offers little oversight for firms, an inability to report on bio performance and almost no brand presence to link the professional and the firm.

Firms that are best able to showcase the knowledge and capability of their people will win in the market. The answer to challenges of scale like this is for firms to offer a self-service solution on their own website. 

By being in control of the process on their own website, firms could:

• Build the brand of the firm and professionals at the same time
• Govern biographies to meet firm guidelines and quality control
• Report on the performance of the biographies
• Integrate them automatically into external listings sites

If firms had their own self-service solution to biographies, the tyranny of scale could be avoided and those professionals who are so central to successfully marketing the firm could be included in the process of doing just that.