Charlie: Welcome to this episode of the CMO Series Digital Masterclass. I'm Charlie Knight and our guest today is Amanda Schneider, the Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer at Epstein Becker Green. Amanda brings over 20 years of law firm leadership experience to discuss how CMOs can successfully balance promoting a firm's overall brand while elevating the individual brands of its attorneys. Amanda will share her insights on integrating personal branding into a firm's marketing strategy, the role of thought leadership in this process, and how to create a cohesive brand across different practice areas. So welcome, Amanda.

Amanda: Thanks for having me today. 

Charlie: Thank you for joining us and making the time. Great to speak to you and have you on this series. Obviously, you're a familiar face on the CMO Series podcast, so I really appreciate you having your back for Digital Masterclass today. So I guess to dive straight in, talking about balancing a law firm's brand with the kind of personal brands of attorneys, how can firms kind of strike that balance between their overall brands and those individual attorney brands?

Amanda: So balancing a law firm's brand with the brands of its attorneys requires recognizing the strengths that each adds. I see the firm's brand, the overall brand, as the foundation, and that establishes credibility and trust in the marketplace through the collective experience of all of the attorneys and the practice focus. But meanwhile, there are opportunities to showcase the individual attorneys from their specialized points of view, which I think really adds value. I would note that when you are representing both the firm and the attorneys, it's really critical to align the messaging and have some guidelines in place. So we have an external communications policy that we work on with our Office of the General Counsel, and that ensures that our attorneys know that there are certain guidelines around how we talk about clients, how we deal with political issues, and things like that, so that we're all on the same page. We also have editorial teams in place to ensure that our thought leadership goes through the consistent measures for checking the content. So things like that allow us to represent both the firm and the attorneys.

Charlie: Yeah, fantastic. Yeah, some really good points there. So it's about kind of making sure, although you're building those individual brands, but that you are kind of aligning that messaging with the firm's kind of brand as well. And then I think really, really important points around kind of having those guidelines, having that external comms kind of policy that everyone can adhere to and get on board with. And then again, having those editorial teams to kind of help manage that whole process and really good points there. How do you bring those, I guess, looking at it from the other perspective, bringing those personal brands of the attorneys, how do you bring those into the firm's overall kind of marketing strategy? And are there any examples that you can share of how you've done that?

Amanda: Sure, absolutely. So we are at the marketing and business development team working constantly with our practices around their strategies within the firm's overall brand. And so we are constantly developing messaging and campaigns that align with the bigger firm goals. We develop at our firm one way that we can integrate our attorneys. When we have initiatives that we're working on for the year in a particular practice, we get attorneys together from the practice and we develop the marketing and business development plans around those initiatives. But it provides opportunities for thought leadership for those individuals that fits into the larger strategy. So really, when I talk about thought leadership, that could range from a blog post, client alert, an event, speaking engagement, articles, podcast videos. It's a variety of different things that you can do. And we are trying to constantly align those individual efforts with the bigger initiatives. So we have a few examples that I can give from our firm. We have a podcast series called Diagnosing Healthcare, and it's a really great platform where we discuss training issues for clients in the healthcare and life sciences space. But the way that we produce that program, we talk about the larger issues, but we also feature individual attorneys as part of that podcast. 

So recently we had an episode about workforce violence prevention, which is an interesting topic for our firm because it's a cross-practice initiative between our employment and our health care practices. We were able to feature three of our attorneys on that podcast. Two are partners and one is an associate sharing their insights and strategies. And so what we're doing there is we're allowing those attorneys at every stage of their career to start building their portfolio, enhancing their biographies, and then providing them with media content that they can amplify on their social media platforms. So another example, a few years ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court, when the Dobbs decision came out, there were a whirlwind of legal challenges, you know, right away that our clients were dealing with. And given our expertise as a firm in healthcare, life sciences, and employment law, we very quickly worked with our attorneys to develop thought leadership in an organized way around that trending issue. So we launched an online portal as a one-stop resource, and that was packed with Dobbs-related content across various media like videos, podcast blogs, social media, and direct client communications. Through that initiative, we had attorneys who took a leadership role. And we were able to highlight them as well, given their work on that trending issue. And it was just a really nice initiative that carefully balanced the firm's brand, and experience level with what our attorneys could contribute.

Charlie: Yeah, fantastic. Some really lovely examples there that you've just talked about. I mean, that podcast series, as you mentioned, is a great way of promoting those individual attorneys that you talked about, those three on that specific example around the workforce violence prevention, and then being able to share it across their platforms, but also with the podcast generally kind of building the brand and supporting that messaging for the firm itself as well. I think podcasts are a really good example of how you can support both the attorney and the individual brand, but maybe I would say that as a podcast host. And then also the thought leadership, that kind of online portal that you talked about, around that really timely, relevant content that you're pushing out to those clients experiencing those very specific challenges at that point, again, a really great example of how you can build that knowledge and share that, that kind of demonstrates the expertise of your attorneys in those specific practice areas. So yeah, a couple of really poignant examples there. And I think also, you mentioned in that online portal, so you had the podcast, but also using the various types of media that you talked about, videos, podcasts, articles, whatever it might be, I think is another thing firms can consider. Keeping that rich variety of media and not just sticking to one is an important point as well. So Amanda, I guess you've talked a bit there around thought leadership, but what role do you see thought leadership playing in building the personal brands and legal brands?

Amanda: I think it's extremely important in building the firm's brand and also the individual attorney brands. We start talking about thought leadership from day one of attorneys practicing at Epstein-Becker Green, and we provide opportunities for our associates to contribute to thought leadership and begin to get that training that they're going to need as their career develops. So I think it's really critical. The firm has to create lots of different opportunities and ways that the attorneys can contribute. Because as you were saying, not everyone wants to do a podcast. There are lots of opportunities. You can write an article, you can speak. It's really finding what meets your style as an attorney and the medium within your firm that you can produce that content. We have a really great example. In 2015, we started this weekly video show called Employment Law This Week. We talked about training issues in employment and labor law, and we were able to feature every week one of our attorneys on that show. So we have just produced our 363rd episode of Employment Law This Week. That is 363 opportunities for our attorneys to build their brand, but still have it tied to the larger initiative that the firm is producing. Every week, those attorneys that are featured are really speaking to the issues that are being featured in that particular episode. Not only did we showcase our attorneys, but we've also featured our clients on Employment Law This Week. It's a really great client development opportunity to work with your clients in that way. It also provides content for those clients on their social media mediums and on their website or however they want to showcase that content. It has been a really good collaboration for us as a firm. I would note that we're a mid-sized firm, but we produce so much thought leadership that it makes us competitive with firms of a larger size because it has been a core value of the firm that we will develop thought leadership for our clients. And you can see that in how we compete with larger firms in the industry.

Charlie: Brilliant. I mean, that's another really interesting point—being able to punch above your weight as a firm, producing that much thought leadership, and demonstrating the value to the market. Although you're a mid-sized firm, that's enabling you to compete with larger firms. So that's another pertinent point for other firms to consider when they're looking at their thought leadership strategy. And just some great examples there as well. You talked about the weekly video show. Similar to the podcast, it's a fantastic way of featuring all of those attorneys. 363 episodes is fantastic. So congratulations on that. That's a pretty long-running show, so well done. And like you say, a great way of featuring those clients that have come on and using that as a client development tool. I think a lot of firms perhaps think about their thought leadership as this extra thing they have to do for business development, rather than seeing it as this amazing opportunity to speak to their clients and get them involved in actually generating that content. What a clever way of doing it and giving the clients that extra value add as well. It's an excellent initiative you've got there. 

Amanda: And I think one point that you make about client development, we've had a few recent examples where an attorney has said that a prospect was searching online for a particular issue and they ran across a piece of our thought leadership. It wasn't even written by the attorney that they contacted, but it really started their exploration of our website, right? So another important thing to note is when marketing and BD teams are working on their web content, it's really important to think about your search engine optimization strategy because we do a lot of work at our firm on our SEO and it has led to work coming in because we are found in top searches for certain terms. So I would just note that when you're thinking about your content or your thought leadership, you really have to think about the full picture of the content. And because it does lead to work coming in, it's really, really important.

Charlie: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. SEO, kind of making sure you're considering that as part of that thought leadership strategy. And, you know, you talked about kind of, you know, gaining those leads through someone reading a piece of thought leadership, even, you know, the fact that it was by a different attorney. I've heard from other firms about how similarly with recruitment you know recruiting talent how often someone a new hire will have read something or seen something or listen to a podcast from from that particular firm and that's kind of you know appealed to them and and kind of attracted them to apply for a role at that firm so again lots of lots of benefits for firms to kind of put out this you know thought leadership as well so we've talked a lot around kind of thought leadership and you've obviously given us some fantastic examples there you know when it comes to differentiating practice areas how do those different practice areas and their those brands work within the firm's overall brand.

Amanda: Sure. So you have to think about each practice area being able to develop its own value proposition, but also staying connected to the firm's overall strategy and its core values. This allows each area to communicate how the attorneys partner with clients in their specific area of law to solve challenges while still being part of that larger firm framework. We also, at Epstein-Becker Green, we emphasize cross-practice services for our clients. So, identifying and leveraging synergies between the different practice areas where we can provide client solutions that enhances our overall value proposition. We have, and a great example of this is our litigation and business disputes practice. They are really, you know, that practice serves all of our practice areas in the firm. We have litigation that occurs in the various practices. And so we actually developed a, it's a video podcast called Speaking of Litigation, where our litigators can talk about the work that they do cross-practice. And still, you know, how that ties into the firm's brand overall. We've been able to feature topics like AI, government investigations. Privacy issues, and even dietary supplement class actions, which is really relevant to our, you know, healthcare and life sciences practice. So by producing these larger efforts that are really broad, you can showcase the various initiatives that the firm's working on and the attorneys that are working on those initiatives. So it's really good to create a medium that does cross-practice work.

Charlie: And yeah, another fantastic example there, speaking of litigation, that podcast you mentioned, that's a great way of kind of, as you mentioned, showcasing those specific practice areas, you know, the brands of the attorneys themselves, but also underpinning the firm's overall kind of messaging. So a kind of a catch-all way of doing it. So a really kind of smart way to go, I think. Thank you for sharing that. And then I guess with all of these brilliant campaigns and initiatives and kind of different podcasts and video series that you have going, how do you kind of measure whether a brand is effective and how do you approach that from the individual's perspective as well as the firm?

Amanda: Right. Well, it's really all about the metrics. Our team is constantly looking at the different metrics for the variety of content that we're producing. You can look at things like client acquisition rates, click rates, the topics that are the most highly viewed. And then your brand recognition is validated by organizations like BTI or Chambers in your brand effectiveness, but those metrics play a really key role. I always talk to the team about how we communicate those metrics back to our attorneys. So often we're presenting those metrics at our practice committee meetings so that we can talk to the attorneys about what they mean. Often if we see topics that are particularly popular that people are viewing, we encourage our attorneys to do more on those topics because clearly that's trending and that's something that our clients or prospects want to hear or see more about. As to how you think about measuring individual success as an attorney. We encourage all of our attorneys to share content on LinkedIn and other social media platforms. And you can see on your LinkedIn profile what the viewership of particular content is. But also more than important than that is the engagement that they're having with people in the industry. So not just posting something, but trying to start a conversation online with a prospect or even someone else in the industry. That's really important to have great engagement on those platforms. So, and obviously if work comes in the door, that's a very clear measure of the effectiveness of these efforts.

Charlie: Yeah, brilliant. I think, you know, some great points to reflect on there. So, you know, from a firm perspective, you've obviously got those metrics that you can dive into, you know, on client acquisition, the kind of the most highly viewed topics, as well as your other kind of data points. But I think that point you made around kind of the feedback loop and. Making sure that the attorneys and the individuals that have, you know, helped generate that content or been part of that process kind of get to see that and kind of understand the impact that they've made as well on an individual basis is really important because I imagine that kind of gives them the impetus and the motivation to continue and to want to kind of be involved in future campaigns as well. So another great point for firms to think about. Just kind of coming to the end of this episode, and the time has really flown today. What would be, you've given some fantastic tips, but if you had to give one, what would be your top tip for marketing or BD leaders looking to take this more integrated approach to kind of building their attorneys' brands with their all-firm brand?

Amanda: My advice would be to foster a robust collaboration between the marketing and business development team and the firm's attorneys to always be in listening mode. So if you're in a meeting and you hear a topic that's going to be trending for our client base to go back to the team and communicate that we might have something that we could work into one of our platforms that would be really relevant. It's it's really it's just such a partnership with our attorneys to develop really great content and they are attorneys at Epstein Becker Green have come to rely on the marketing and business development team to help them take an idea foster it and then see an end result and that's really gratifying for me and for members of my team.

Charlie: Brilliant so we've got kind of foster that robust collaboration with your you know your marketing and BD teams with your partners your attorneys kind of build build those relationships and then kind of yeah going into that listening mode or I'd say to my daughter can I put your listening ears on but yeah really really good point to get everyone kind of in the right headspace to kind of get on board with with all of this thank you amanda there's been some really great nuggets of advice in there so thank you for joining us today it's been an absolute pleasure thank you for having me today brilliant so it's been wonderful to have you on and talk about how to integrate attorney brands with the firm's online brands but that is all for this episode of CMO series digital masterclass thank you to everyone who's listening and you can catch all of the episodes by subscribing to the Passle CMO series podcast on your favorite podcast platform.