Rebrands. They can be some of the most exciting and challenging projects a legal marketer can take on. 

On today’s episode of the CMO Series, Charles Cousins is lucky to welcome someone who has recently completed a rebranding project. Erica Roman, Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Cole Schotz, joins the series to go behind the scenes and discuss the challenges and successes of a law firm rebrand.

Charles and Erica explore: 

• How Erica came to be the CMO at Cole Schotz and at what point on the journey she recognised a rebrand was needed
• How to approach early conversations about the website and the need for redesign
• The process from start to finish and the type of internal resources required for the project
• How to involve the wider firm and the approach to getting feedback
• Where the direction of "Lawyering is our Art" came from
• The biggest challenge of the project and the biggest success
• Advice for others looking to be successful in leading rebrands within their law firm

Transcription:

Charles: A law firm rebrand is no small feat and it can be some of the most exciting and challenging projects a legal marketer can take on today. We're lucky to get a behind-the-scenes look at a recent rebrand from US firm, Cole Schotz. We're joined by Erica Roman CMO of Cole Schotz, and hopefully we can dive into the project, its challenges, successes and how the whole thing came about.

Welcome to the CMO series, Erica.

Erica: Hi, thanks for having me. 

Charles: It's a pleasure to chat to you and obviously a law firm rebrand is a massive project. So we can get into a bit more detail about how that all came about and the decision behind that. But actually, to kick things off, are you able to tell us how you came to be the CMO at Cole Schotz? And maybe at what point on that journey you realised a rebrand was needed?

Erica: Yeah. So I'm a former practising attorney. I practised public finance for five years and I got to the point where I was like, this is not where my passion lies. So I started googling non-practising attorneys, and jobs for non-practising attorneys. And I came across Bloomberg, I  worked at Bloomberg for a number of years. And that's where I got my experience with selling to law firms and selling client support service. And at that point, they were launching the business development platform through doing that. I realised I wanted to get, take my experience and go back into a law firm setting. I felt that law firms really don't give support when it comes to business development. It's kind of like, "Hey, you know, go out there and shine, use your amazing personality". But if you look at other services in any industry, there's training, there's how to sell, you don't touch a client or go out in the fields with at least, you know, a week or two of training at the very minimum. So I really wanted to provide that to law firms. I was lucky enough to meet with the management at Cole Schotz who shared my vision. I jumped right in, it was very well received. And before you know it, you know, just everything I was kind of working on, just it made sense and they wanted to really take that rather than marketing that business development focus. Long story short, they saw what I could do and they offered me the position as their CMO which was great.

Charles: Well, it sounds like it was a sort of a match made in heaven if you slotted right in and found your place.

Erica: It's a great way to put it. It was you just, I think when you interview with someone, you just get that feeling and I just got that gut feeling that this was going to be my home for a while. They understood me and I understood their needs and they really gave me the room to take different initiatives, think out of the box, and do things that haven't necessarily been done before or just a little bit different. And they gave me the support that I needed in order to support them really.

Charles: Wonderful. So you've taken up the role of CMO and at what point was it when you sort of realised that a rebrand was needed?

Erica: Admittedly, I'm a Taurus I'm a visually OCD person. So, I like everything pretty, right? and visually appealing. And I do come from a family of artists, right? So, I always felt like the website just wasn't a reflection of who we are, it just didn't do us justice. We are a firm or a 200 firm that punches above our weight. We're in the room with the big boys a lot, the a 100 firm, you know, many times the firms within the top 20 and I just felt like our current branding, our current website just didn't really reach a level of sophistication and tell a story about who we are and differentiate us in any way. I mean, all the colours like orange and purple. So those are our previous colours. I mean, I think that's only cool if you're like FedEx. So all respect to the previous CMO who, you know, as we know, aesthetics change over time, colours and trends go in and out. But I wanted to create something that was pretty timeless - was really out of the box out of the law firm norm.

Charles: In terms of you, you've highlighted that your website wasn't really reflective of you as a firm, and it needed that sort of redesign. How did you approach those early conversations with the management about the website and say, "Look, this isn't quite right and we need to make a change." How did you go about those conversations?

Erica: I had to speak their language, right? Because I think a lot of our new matters come in through referrals. Somebody worked with us, they know us, they know our reputation and then they go to the website and it's almost like a credential check, right? So I think a lot of law firm CMOs could get resistance in the beginning because they're like, “Well, you know, it's just, that's not how we get business.” Right? I think that as the world becomes more digital, especially when you look at COVID. Right? There's this distance, there are fewer people meeting in person, I think obviously we're returning back to that, but a law firm website tends to stand for your identity. It's who you are. If they don't know you, even if it is a credential check, we want to impress them if somebody is given three names, I want us to stand out in some way. I didn't want us to be, you know, a kind of like run-of-the-mill looking law firm. I wanted to immediately grab attention and I think we've become so visual in the world of Instagram, Facebook. Our attention spans are incredibly low. So, you know, my thought is to lock them in with an identity that's so different and interesting that it's hard for them to leave and then pull them in with our messaging our words, our mission, who we are, our culture and so on and so forth. So luckily, you know, the silver lining of something like COVID is that we were running around a bit less, right? We had other, our other initiatives got tabled and it gave me the opportunity to say, “Hey, we're kind of stuck at home right now. I think it's time” and they agreed.

Charles: Yeah. So it sounds like you know, timing played a part of that but also just highlighting to the senior team that, you know, we want to stand out, we want to grab attention and we're not currently doing that. 

Erica: Yeah, I think, you know, law firms tend to think, well, we're not a car, so to speak, right? Or you're not apparel. So why is branding so important? But people do buy brands, we see it all the time. There's big name branding in law firms, right? So how do you if you're not part of like the top 10 where people just buy it because of brand recognition will pay inflated rates? How do you stand out? How do you become memorable? How do you make yourself a household name, so to speak? And I do think that branding yourself is important no matter what the space and I think that's changing even in legal.

Charles: So in terms of the process you followed. What did that look like? What was the general process and what type of internal resources did you have working on this website project? 

Erica: The first step was, you know, everything we do, we do for the firm and our attorneys, we really wanted them to feel a part of the process. This isn't something that we were gonna take on and say, “Hey, we're gonna create this for you and just serve it up and like surprise you with it” right? This is the story of our attorneys. This is made to highlight them, market them, and their practice. So getting their perspective of who we are and what we wanted to show was important. I needed them to know that they were all a part of this and get their buy-in from the beginning. So the first thing that we did was survey them and we're, you know, we asked them questions like, what do you think sets this law firm apart? What sets your practice apart? What adjective would you use to uh describe the firm yourself, your practice, we surveyed them and we took all that information and there were some things that really stood out and that trended and that's what we used to build this brand. 

Charles: And was there anything that came back out of that survey? And that, that surprised you or that you didn't expect?

Erica: You know, it's funny because I kind of had my feelings as we're going through this about, you know, where we ended up and the artistic route and actually the words ended up fitting that really perfectly. So it's kind of like the stars aligned, right, the way people, the self-reflection that we got really, just gave us all these pieces of that puzzle to create like a really nice I'll say story about who we are. So I wasn't all surprised because everybody is very… there's something special about this firm and the way people approach the practice and it does have this familial feel. You know, the firm started off small group pretty quickly. We've had people that have many people have been at the firm, staff and attorneys alike for over 20 years. So to me that says a lot, there's a lot of history and long longevity at the firm.

Charles: So the new direction “lawyering is our art”, which is your tagline. It's on the front page of the website, where did that direction come from?

Erica: So it came from the survey, we were actually preparing a speech for a recognition that we received. We realised the way in writing that speech, we realised the way our attorneys approach their practice really is like an artist approaches creating a piece of art. I feel like when you engage an attorney from Cole Schotz you're commissioning almost a legal artist. They're, you tell them your vision and they're, they're meticulous, they take their time, they look at every detail, understanding the value of every detail and they really do work tirelessly to create something that distinguished, that is very unique to the individual's needs. And it just screams, you know, almost like it has this like superior craftsmanship element to it. So it really just and watching my colleagues and through the survey and the way they describe themselves. It wrote itself. I wanted to bring in visual, as I mentioned before, I wanted to bring in visual pieces that are gonna be engaging. So I didn't want to just like, randomly, you know, create a very artistic website, right? Because like, "What's the connection here?” Like, “Who do they think they are?” Like, ” They're just a law firm? Why do they look so artistic?” again, it kind of just all fell together and I was like, “Wait, hold on. Like lawyering is our art.” And I think when you put it that way, it out of the gate tells the story of just how we approach lawyering here and um how the attorneys approach their craft. And it says so much with the little words.

Charles: It does and the idea that you're commissioning a legal artist and lawyering is your art. You know in very few words, it does describe what you guys are trying to do. I know the project's finished now, you've got some fantastic results, a fantastic website, some new branding, and law is our art, commissioning a legal artist, all of that. In terms of the rebrand project as a whole, what were the biggest challenges? And what were the biggest successes of it?

Erica: It's a big project. And I personally have never done this before. So I think, you know, Ignorance is bliss because I went into it and, you know, it's super exciting to get the opportunity to do it. And I have such an amazing team and we're all very excited and then, you know, you get into the thick of it and you're like, “Wow, this is a lot” and it's not like everything else stopped, right? Like we had everything else that we were already doing and like I said, COVID kind of gave us a little bit of a breather. There's just so much to it. Like you look at the amount of pages, we have hundreds and hundreds of pages. We did not copy and paste, not one sentence or paragraph, everything was rewritten, right? Some of it, we could do, the marketing and business development team, but a lot of it, we had to collaborate with the attorneys, right? And they're busy, you know, so they were extremely, very helpful, but it's also getting on their calendar, getting the time and keeping things moving at the pace that you want to. So you could deliver the project in time. We definitely ran over our timeline on that. I'm ok with that, right? We got to the finish line eventually. But I think it just when I think about how small our team is and the amount we accomplished, it's something that I know that we are all extremely proud of because even every picture that we chose, if you look at the practice group pages, we have a combination of photography from our photographer we hired. Some of it is my photography, some of it is Ariel Newcomb’s photography. We did pictures within pictures. We got really creative with just like our practice group landing pages. Everything was so deliberate and so well thought out. We were a bit neurotic about it. But, you know, it's just because we were so invested and cared so much about it. So when we look back and we see how much we really put into it. It's pretty wild.

Charles: Yeah. Well, and I think from the outside we can see that. You've finished with a fantastic outcome. So obviously all that hard graft was worthwhile. Okay, Erica. So it's that time in the podcast where we jump into the quick fire round and we find out a bit more about Erica Roman who she is as a person so that when people bump into you at these events, they can chat to you and ask you about what you said in these quick fire round. So to kick things off, what's your favourite book?

Erica: That's a hard one. I think that's like asking me, you know, which is my favourite child of the three. I've read so many good books and I tend to, you know, what's top of mind for me right now? Actually The Subtle Art of Not Giving… I'll say bleep, it's actually on my second read of that because I really just enjoy the way it's written. I tend to like non-fiction, self-improvement, psychological type books, and this one is just, it's so engaging and I think it's one of those ones that you can read over and over to kind of realign yourself. And it's something that I can share the lessons learned with others not necessarily telling them I got it from this book. It's, you know, it has a strong title to it.

Charles: Fantastic. And what was your first job? 

Erica: That's a really funny one. So, growing up, we lived across the street from a funeral parlor and my parents were friends with the owner and my older two brothers used to clean the limos and the hearses. And when I was old enough, I was able to do that and I just wanted the extra money and then I realised I was extremely afraid to be there. So my father had to go with me every time. But yeah, interesting first job for a young girl.

Charles: That is interesting. And I thought you were gonna say you're out there digging graves or something like that.

Erica: No, no, no. 

Charles: And what makes you happy at work?

Erica: My team, my colleagues, the creativity, the collaboration, it's always something new and different. The days are not repetitive. There's so much that makes me happy at work. But the core of it, it's the people that I'm surrounded by.

Charles: That's good to hear. What are you listening to at the moment? This could be podcast, music, audiobook.

Erica: So I'm actually, I am a big fan of house music. My brother was a DJ when I was younger. So I have been looking at them or listening to soundcloud, tuning into Defected  Records Radio and it's just, I've gone down that wormhole and that's what's trending on my phone right now.

Charles: Fantastic. So, you'd be at home in Ibiza down Pacha fist pumping away to the house music. Is that right?

Erica: If I could be in Ibiza at Pacha or something like that in the rest of my life, I would be there.

Charles: Where is your favorite place to visit and why?

Erica:  I would have to say, Puerto Rico, I am of Puerto Rican descent. And we recently took a family trip. I took the kids and went with my parents and it was just nice, I think when you return to where your ancestors came from, that you just have this automatic sense of being at home and a connection. So I would have to say that would be my favourite place and it's just gorgeous. 

Charles: And it's probably a little bit warmer in Puerto Rico than it is in New Jersey at the moment hey

Erica: You think?

Charles: Fantastic. So, bringing things back to the rebrand. We've highlighted some of your successes, things that were challenging, and things that you enjoyed doing. If you could give one piece of advice for others embarking on a rebrand and how they can ensure success, what would that be?

Erica: I think it's two-pronged. I think, you know, it's a fine line with legal marketing and a rebrand like this because if you want to do something out of the box, you still have to maintain that level of sophistication, right? So it's a very, very fine line and a tightrope that's to be walked at the same time. I think it's really important to stay true to your vision. I know I had this bird's eye view of how it was all gonna come together, but not everybody did, right? And there were times when I think myself and the team would question ourselves because, you know, did we go too far this way or this way? And at the end of the day, we stuck to our guns, we knew what our vision was. And the other part of this was bringing in our attorneys that I mentioned ahead of time to let them know that they have a piece of this too. They're gonna be reflected this in this. They're part of the process. So really involving them and having them engage with us throughout was so, so important, giving them just enough to see the vision, but also, you know, attorneys are risk averse and we're in a, as a former practicing attorney, like we're, that's how we're trained. Right?. It's like you stay in a box. But I'm so lucky to work with such an amazing group of colleagues, you know, to have the support that I have and to have the trust that they gave me and the team was, was just so so important to have their trust and to have their support throughout so that we could, you know, end up where we, we had planned on ending up.

Charles: Brilliant. So the two things I jotted down there were um have confidence in yourself and stick to your guns and the second one I jotted down was making sure you involve the attorneys and bring them on that journey as well. Well, Erica, it's been an absolute pleasure to chat today and catch up and hear about the rebrand project at Cole Schotz. What you've ended up with is fantastic and you know, it's a testament to the hard work that you and your team put into that project. And so thanks for coming on and sharing with us a bit about that process and how you got to where you are today.

Erica: It's been my absolute pleasure speaking with you about this. Thank you for having me.