Charles:

"Thanks for joining us today. Those of you that know Passle know that we like to often put on events where we bring people together. There's normally a few reasons we do that. The main one is we like to have a bit of a party and get folks in the same room networking. But the other thing is how important it is for knowledge sharing. So the collective brainpower in the room—there are so many great ideas and so many people doing great things at their firms. So we love to get folks together and help share some of those insights.

That's particularly what we're going to do today. We like to shine the light on one of our clients or one of our friends that is doing something interesting and get them to tell a bit of a story. That's why we were super happy when Sophie and the team from Bird & Bird decided they would come and share about some of the projects they've been working on.

Some of you, or many of you, might know Sophie, but for those who don't, Sophie is the Chief Marketing Officer at Bird & Bird, a large international law firm. For those of you who aren't in law, Bird & Bird are very well known for being forward-thinking and innovative. I think Sophie's been instrumental in driving some of the big digital changes there over the last few years and really on a global scale. And when we say global, we do mean global. If your LinkedIn is up to date, then Bird & Bird spans across 32 countries and 1,700 lawyers, so it's a really wide-reaching firm. Obviously, Sophie leads a team that's important for elevating the firm's profile.

So yeah, Sophie, thanks for coming along and answering a few questions. As mentioned, we work with a lot of law firms, and so many people are doing great and exciting things. But one of the reasons why we approached Sophie and her team to speak today was because of the scale and size of the project that they're undertaking, particularly in relation to Passle.

Many Passle clients are in the room, but the size and scale of creating a scalable infrastructure where those 1,700 lawyers across the firm have an effective way to raise their profile, to do their business development, and create thought leadership and distribute that on a big scale—we thought was very interesting, and that's what we're going to dive into today.

I think when we're looking at the Passle stuff in particular, it's a really good illustration of some of that dedication to digital innovation that I mentioned earlier. Something that we hear a lot talking with the Bird & Bird team is your idea of delivering a bold market presence at scale. Hopefully, some of the ideas on how they're doing that, Sophie's gonna share today with you guys. I don't think they'll give you the full secret sauce and the industry tips, but there's gonna be lots to take away.

So maybe a good starting point is to look back to actually when we first met Sophie. It was back in 2022. It was off the back of the Bird & Bird rebrand—you had a new website. There was also lots of other hectic stuff going on in 2022, but this is probably one of the more positive things.

I think it's a good place to start there because some of the ideas and themes of why you were doing that rebrand and the new website link nicely to the digital projects that are happening today. So maybe we can start there with what was the reason behind the shake-up and the rebrand back in 2022?"

Sophie:

"Yeah, so that was another big project—we love doing big projects at Bird & Bird. I think we got to a point where we felt our website, first and foremost, and then actually our wider brand, when we really looked at it, didn't really reflect the firm that we were then and the firm we are today.

There was a lot more vibrancy, a lot more interesting people sort of coming through. Our brand over the years had stagnated slightly or not really kept pace with what was going on in the firm—the fantastic people we had, the countries we were in, the work we were doing, especially in the tech space, which is something that we're really known for.

So in redoing the website, we decided we might as well redo the brand as well. And because, as you said, it was coming off the end of the COVID period when we'd all been working away from home, experiencing lockdowns, etc., we'd all really zoned in on that kind of human connection piece. You know, in the old days before everybody had nice Zoom and Teams backgrounds, you could see people's living rooms and bedrooms and kids running in and all that kind of stuff—all those brilliant Zoom moments that we remember so well.

We'd really got a sense of our people and our client relationships over the course of that time, and it suddenly felt right to bring that kind of human-centric approach into our brand a lot more, rather than hiding behind a corporate brand. I think law firm brands are known for being navy blue because that means trust and for sometimes being a bit faceless. We have quite a few maverick, interesting people in Bird & Bird, so we really wanted to bring them to the fore. That was the starting point.

We started thinking about this more human-centric approach, and that really led everything that we were doing in the brand. We have our tagline 'One firm, your firm,' so speaking directly to our clients and also to our people. We started a bit of a biography refresh project, actually, before that, where our lawyers answer a series of little get-to-know type questions—favorite book, languages spoken, countries I've lived in, etc.—just to bring that human element through a lot more.

So I think that's where the more human-centric approach started for us across the website and the brand and has gone on since then. We still get amazing feedback. Often when I meet people, they say, 'Oh, I looked at your website, and it didn't look like a law firm website.' And we go, 'Tick, yay.' It's a lot more colorful; it's a lot more interesting. We've actually had somebody in the firm say that they won a big intellectual property case because the client was looking at our brand and really wanted what we were representing—they wanted that coming through in terms of who was advising them. So it's very rare that you can say, 'Oh, the website won us a brilliant piece of work,' but actually in this case, it did. So yeah, we think that did a really good job for us."

Charles:

"Wonderful. And I think that human-centric approach is something that links nicely to the digital project you're doing at the moment. Obviously, you want the lawyers' brand to shine through, but you've got to have a way to do that. Something we've talked about is that idea of giving a self-service approach to these lawyers.

For the benefit of those in the room, could you talk a bit more about this self-service approach and what you've been doing with digital in empowering the individual lawyers to own their own brand, do their BD, do their profile raising?"

Sophie:

"Yeah, and again, I think a lot of it started in COVID when we had to do that pivot away from events in the office to digital events. Everybody suddenly went crazy for LinkedIn because they couldn't meet people in person or at conferences anymore. That's when we really had to respond and up our game in terms of providing digital assets, LinkedIn training, or any number of things—templates, etc.—to really help our lawyers engage with their clients and prospects and market themselves through digital channels.

I think that's where we started. LinkedIn training has been a huge thing. I think we all know and can see the stats that individual accounts will often perform better than firm or corporate accounts. So we really doubled down on that and got our lawyers comfortable with their personal brand on top of the firm-wide brand, what stories they're trying to tell, what work they're trying to win, and making sure they're posting in line with that and bringing some of their own personality and sometimes their personal lives into that as well.

That's been a huge piece of work, and we've continued that through everything else we're doing. Passle is obviously a brilliant way to do that because it allows the lawyers to do some of their publishing more individually. They've got more comfortable with self-serve if we show them how we want them to do it and the way we think they should be following some best practices. Now I think we're ready to see them make that leap a bit more in terms of publishing their own content and really getting a look under the hood at how that's performing with their analytics."

Charles:

"Yeah, and if we think about the infrastructure for a moment of how you're doing thought leadership—and something we worked closely with Ben and Michelle at the front of the room in the Bird & Bird team—was this idea of decentralizing the publishing a little bit. Something that came up was that Bird & Bird has seen this huge growth in lawyers; the headcount of lawyers has grown, but Michelle's team, Sophie's team, has stayed the same. So they've really had to find a way to make things scalable.

Which leads me onto my next question, which is around your focus on having that bold market presence. Where does thought leadership come into that, and where does the onboarding of technologies fit into achieving your strategy of having that bold market presence?"

Sophie:

"Yeah, so bold market presence is one of the pillars of our five-year strategy. We had a new CEO in place about two years ago and started articulating a five-year strategy, which we never really had before—we kind of went from year to year. That was a big piece of work for the whole firm in terms of where we want to be in five years' time for each group and for each department in business services as well. That has really meant that we've got consistency and understanding between us all, cohesion around the pillars of that strategy.

Bold market presence is one of those pillars. Speaks for itself—we would like to have a bolder presence out in the markets in which we operate. As part of that initiative, we've been looking at what we do firm-wide and the brand-building piece, but also, as we say, for individual groups, they've got real clarity and they are communicating more clearly than they ever have before where they want to be, the work they want to win, what they want to be doing, what they want to be known for in the market.

That really helps us to say, 'Okay, if that's where you're going, this is the thought leadership strategy that's going to help support that.' Instead of everybody doing their own thing, it's a little bit more joined up. The same actually then for some individuals when they're trying to win work—making sure they're talking about the kinds of issues that they want to act on, etc.

We're massively matrixed as an organization, and I'm sure a lot of you are the same. We have sector groups, practice groups, countries, so it can all get a bit overwhelming in terms of the structure. But each group within that has a clear idea of where they're going and how their thought leadership can help support them with that. That's been really helpful for us.

In terms of technology, we're always evaluating our martech stack. We'll have lots of pieces of technology that we've had for years and new things that we're looking to build in. I think for us at the moment, because we've had such success with this self-serve approach, that has become one of the most important things for us. Can we use technology to make sure that we're able to get out to market quickly and effectively themselves?

Crucially, I think the data analytics piece—you know, a lot of us have probably talked over the years about data-driven marketing and the data-driven approach. Then we get these big packs of data through, and we try to make sense of them. Actually putting that data back in the hands of the people who are contributing the thought leadership—writing articles, posting, etc.—I think really helps them to see for themselves what's really working for them and what maybe isn't and they should stop doing. It's a little bit around what we should be doing more of to reach our goals and also what we should stop doing because, as you say, there's a lot of people doing a lot of things, and it works best for us when it's more streamlined."

Charles:

"And that idea of—I don't know if Michelle maybe phrased it—the democratizing of data. Is that something that's been hard to change? Is that different from how it was working before then?"

Sophie:

"Yeah, I think so. Again, probably with people getting quite nerdy about their LinkedIn profiles and being able to see how their posts are performing, now they want to know that in terms of website content, podcasts, videos they're doing, etc. If we can make that available to them all without them having to go through central barriers of the central team, then that really helps.

What I'm really hoping to see then is behavioral change where that informs what they do, and people double down on the stuff that's working really well and maybe try a different tack or stop doing the stuff that's not working so well."

Charles:

"And a question that probably a few folks are wondering is how did you get buy-in from that? I just had one conversation earlier today about someone struggling to get buy-in from folks at the firm. Did you go to the lawyers with this bold idea, or did you have a few advocates that were helping you a bit? How did you get on board and get the sign-off to go and do this with 1,700 lawyers?"

Sophie:

"Yeah, I think it's been phased. Because of everything we've built and the understanding and engagement that we had around the brand refresh, people can see for themselves that it works. So we've built up a bit of trust and a bit of internal capital there, same with the website as well.

The fact that we have this five-year strategy and we have said as a firm we want to go after our market presence—we want to improve this across our markets—that kind of gives us license to go and say, 'You want to do this; let's do this.' That helps you achieve your goals. Like I say, I think because each group has their version of what that means for them, we can tweak it.

That's where the scale and the infrastructure piece comes in for us. I think we'll see the benefits realized more wholly across the whole organization because we're doing it everywhere all at once in a very structured, phased way rather than just doing it with one team and then next year doing it with the other team, etc. We can say to each team, 'You want to achieve this; this is a way of doing that.' But actually, those benefits that we're going to get from working with all the teams—so pushing that out—becomes a lot easier to see across the whole firm.

We have done pilots with a couple of teams, and the people in those teams love it, and they can see it's really working for them. But people in the other teams don't necessarily know that as much and aren't impacted. So when we activate it across all of the firm at the same time, we get everybody really engaging in this new way—that becomes a bit more powerful."

Charles:

"And one of my questions off the back of that is around communicating that internally. Do you have a plan of how you're doing that, or is a little bit happening organically? Or is it we've got a set way of communicating the success? This doesn't have to be in relation to the Passle project; it could be any sort of project. But what does that communication process look like internally when you've got to communicate at such a large firm across those 32 countries?"

Sophie:

"Yeah, I think we've learned it's a leave-no-stone-unturned kind of approach with our bigger projects. That does mean that Ben and Michelle are speaking to different people in the business every day across different time zones, saying the same things again and again to get the message across.

We've completely got that structure internally in terms of, right, we're going to go to each country, and we're going to go to their town halls or their team meetings or wherever they're meeting. Over the next few months and over the last few months, we've been going and speaking to them about it, meeting them where they are rather than just doing central, top-down in our big internal channels—'We're doing this now; hope you all would like to come along,' etc.—and actually talking to them all about the change has been really helpful.

Michelle's done an awful lot of work up front, actually, in terms of discovery. So we know why we want to bring Passle in, for example, centrally. But instead of imposing our idea of the efficiencies we're going to get for the firm, we've presented all the benefits that it opens up and then allowed people to talk about the difficulties and the challenges. Then we make sure that our messages are framed around those local difficulties or challenges."

Charles:

"One of the things that we were impressed with at Passle working with you folks was how connected everything seemed to be in the process of you onboarding our tool. For example, the digital team was driving it, but also we had the BD teams involved. It seemed like there was a plan and a structure in place.

For a big enterprise project like this, what roles do the different teams play in getting something like that off the ground?"

Sophie:

"Yeah, so I think within our department, we've got, as you say, the digital team driving it centrally, but then meeting the BD team representing their groups and doing a bit of getting under the skin of those groups, getting a couple of pilot groups who can test it out for us and work with us. Again, Michelle was speaking very much to their needs and wants as well, in terms of sometimes they're the ones schlepping back and forth trying to get content up from their groups with digital teams, so talking to the fact that this will make their lives easier as well.

Then our country marketers as well, and that is a tricky thing for them because they've got full-time jobs and a lot of plates that they're juggling. If we don't say in advance, 'Hey, this is coming down the line,' then it's a big present that comes from central—like, 'Great, thank you very much.' So really working with them.

I think, again, probably some of the things we've been doing around the five-year strategy just means we get a bit of a smoother ride because it is so aligned, and this self-serve piece has really helped.

On the BD side, for example, another big project that we've been doing is rolling out the Activator BD and sales training that has been doing the rounds from DCMI. We were part of the initial research that they did with Intapp, a tech provider on the CRM side, looking at—I think it was the genome of a rainmaker—what makes a rainmaker in professional services. So we were part of that research. We were really interested in the results. That went live in Harvard Business Review and gained a lot of traction, and then the training program came out the other side of that.

We went ahead with the training program as well. We went ahead with the train-the-trainer program, which meant some of our senior BDs got trained up in the delivery of the training, and now we're in this phase of going out to our 400-plus partners and training them. So we clearly just like to do things at scale all at once, like crazy mad people.

But half of that is all about, you know, individually for partners, they can become more of an activator if they just change some of their behaviors and if they commit. Everything that we're creating in terms of thought leadership is something that they can use and put their activated behaviors behind and really use as excuses to reach out to their contacts and continue to do that business development and continue to develop their networks.

So again, it's quite symbiotic. We're doing all these things at the same time because they link together really nicely. They provide a more holistic offering to the lawyers of how they can really move the needle themselves and for their groups and hopefully for the firm. We've got this platform of the five-year strategy where everybody is enthused to give it a go and to change what they've been doing before to doing it now.

It's been a perfect storm of different things coming together, but it's definitely something that the whole team has been involved in."

Charles:

"Yeah, I've seen on LinkedIn Rhea's road trip—Rhea Blakey Glover, who is head of BD at Bird & Bird—she's going around doing the activator training. One of the conversations we had with Rhea is she's investing a lot of time in helping her lawyers become better at their business development. They've got this fantastic activator training that they're doing, and one of the things that links nicely is the project they're doing with Passle also links into that as well.

So Rhea is able to go to the lawyers with the research from Activator and say, 'As part of our five-year strategy, we need to be better at BD; this is what we need to be doing. And the good news for you is marketing and digital have already onboarded this tool that's going to make it easy for you to do one part of that, which is thought leadership. So you're going to be able to create content, share it with the people that are most important to you, and that fits into our activator program, and everyone's going to think you're a legend if you do it.' So it's sort of connecting up the dots, and that's one of the things that's been impressive from our side—seeing you guys be able to do that at such a large scale."

Sophie:

"And we hear it from our lawyers now. I'd be interested to hear if you're experiencing it as well, but I'm speaking with one of our corporate lawyers the other day who now, because he's activated, makes a point of asking clients when they come to him, 'Why did you choose me?' It's fascinating the insight we get. For those of us in the legal industry, the directories apparently still really matter, but then they go onto the website and they're looking at all the different profiles, and they're looking for somebody who's talking about the fact they're working in AI.

So somebody who hasn't updated their profile for two years probably doesn't have that. If they're doing an AI deal, then we think we're going to go between this person and this person, and this is the one who's popped something up on LinkedIn and has been posting about what they've been doing in this space. So this is the one who's obviously doing it. It's been really interesting to get that insight in terms of how the clients are making those decisions about who to work with, and it's all the thought leadership role. The frequency with which people are posting on LinkedIn are some of the things that are tipping them over into choosing us as an advisor. It's really powerful."

Charles:

"Are you capturing that anywhere?"

Sophie:

"Trying to, yeah. This is a big data piece. But yeah, in terms of it's individually and it's across groups. Sometimes it's hard to capture that whole journey digitally, but when you hear it from client feedback as well, it's really powerful."

Charles:

"And in addition to Rhea's road trip of training up folks, is there any other tips or anything you can share around managing that behavioral change at a large scale?"

Sophie:

"Yeah, I think it has been about meeting people where they are and finding their emotional as well as rational levers. Michelle did a big leading strategic projects course, I think, and has brought all of that to bear in this project, so we've all benefited from that. That's something that we see in the activator research as well. It goes back to where we started at the beginning—we're all human beings. We might think that we're making rational business decisions, but actually, we're a lot more driven by the personal and maybe the emotional side than we might like to think.

So actually being able to pull those levers and really sell to people what's in it for you—you're trying to do this, you're trying to get better at business development, you're trying to grow your business—we've got something that can help you. Here's how you engage with it. It's going down a lot better, I think, than 'Use this instead of this now. End of.'"

Charles:

"So we've focused a lot on the positives and the things that have gone well, which is always nice to share. But I do want to ask the question: Has there been any big challenges you've faced or hiccups or anything hard that you've had to work through, and how did you get past it?"

Sophie:

"Yeah, I mean, I think we're still in it. So there will be plenty of challenges to come, and it is the real adoption piece. We've got so far; we've launched; we've got people excited. But we'll be testing in three months' time, in six months' time, in 12 months' time, etc.—has the behavioral change really stuck, and have people adopted those new behaviors?

I think there's a challenge of just keeping going, especially when you're so close to a project and you just want to put it away to one side and do something else. Actually, to continue to bang the drum and to continue making sure that people do make that leap takes a lot of time and effort. So I think we'll see people over the next few months maybe at different stages of that journey and work through, 'Okay, let's keep going.'

We're never going to reach everybody, and I think we're fine with that. So we don't go for a 100% adoption—definitely like it to be over 50%, somewhere in between. I've had it before where somebody flat-out refuses months and months, years and years, and then all of a sudden something changes for them, and then they buy in and they become your biggest advocate. So sometimes it is around the timing.

So we're not there home and dry in terms of the buy-in and the adoption. There are tricky conversations that we continue to have, but I'm hopeful that we can build up a swell of people who are moving in that direction, then others will follow. I think we've talked quite a lot about the scale, and we've tried to chunk it off and go after it phase by phase, but I think the sheer scale is sometimes a bit of a challenge. It just takes a long time to get around to everybody, and by the time you've done all of that, then it's time to re-engage the people that you spoke to at the beginning. So it's probably time and resource is always a tricky thing to manage."

Charles:

"It's the old Forth Road Bridge, isn't it? When they start painting it, they get to the end and they start painting it again."

Sophie:

"Yeah."

Charles:

"Which actually I found out isn't actually true. I think they've got a good paint now—you just paint it and leave it."

Sophie:

"Great."

Charles:

"Anyway, back to legal marketing. So that's where you're at now. Looking forward, what's next on the horizon? What's the digital projects looking like going forward?"

Sophie:

"I think we are focusing a lot more on the quality, tone of voice, and style of our content. We're hopeful that while the lawyers are doing their own thing and publishing, etc., with our overview, we can be a bit more focused on having an editorial curation role on the website, on the podcasts that we're doing, the videos that we're doing, etc., to make sure that it does continue to reinforce that brand. Because it's hard with so many people to ensure that they're all writing in a particular tone of voice, especially when you take into account different languages, different cultures, etc. So there's a lot that we need to do around that to keep it really reinforcing the brand.

We hope to do a little bit more, I think, in terms of the brand to keep it going so it doesn't stagnate. And yeah, I mean, probably loads in terms of the digital side—more personalization, more targeting, etc. We're never short of ideas of new things we can do, and so there will be plenty to do. But yeah, we continue, I think, for the short term pushing away and making sure that behavioral change sticks so we don't step away from it right now."