legal sanity

Last week, Dan Hull of What About Clients? put out a call for commentary on Lovemarks - brands that inspire loyalty beyond reason – in the law. Dan’s interest was sparked by this query/remark from Patrick Lamb of In Search of Perfect Client Service: “does anyone love their law firm and its brand enough to have the name of the firm permanently inked onto their body?” While Patrick was talking about client love, I took on his question and Dan’s call from a different perspective. Dan’s already posted a full screenshot of my remarks on Lovemark branding (thanks, Dan), so I’ll just extract the core for you here: Because we’re in a service profession, any law firm effort to imprint a Lovemark has to start with its service providers – the firm’s lawyers and non-lawyer staff. These people have to be passionate about what they’re doing; where they’re doing it; and who they’re doing it for. (To quote myself) “Without this internal passion core, law firm branding efforts might generate clients, but not the kind of clients who will shout the firm’s praises from the rafters (or permanently ink its name on their bodies).” If a picture paints a thousand words, then the primary value of employee evangelists is beautifully rendered in this aptly-captioned photo passed along by Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba of the Church of the Customer Blog. For a related viewpoint, check out the [non]billable hour, where guest blogger Ron Baker discusses the importance of harnessing the passion of our employee volunteers. Dave Lorenzo adds another dimension to the discussion with a Career Intensity blog post on the emergent individual economy.