For legal technology marketers, the key steps in creating content that captures interest, builds trust, and persuades attorneys and top executives to learn more about a product or service are:
- Discover your target audience’s pain points.
- Unearth the challenges that contribute to these pain points.
- Show how your technology solves those challenges.
Too often, we skip #2 entirely and jump from #1 to #3 without fully understanding the many factors contributing to the issues our clients and prospective clients face. Go a step further, and take a closer look at what’s causing them to struggle. Then, create content that addresses the real challenges of your audience.
Because you’re not just marketing legal technology. You’re selling solutions to legal industry challenges. Cures for the pains attorneys, in-house counsel, and top business executives face. Answers to their most serious problems.
You’re not just marketing #legaltechnology. You’re selling cures for the pains #attorneys, in-house counsel & top business executives face. Click To TweetWhen your content is targeted to the right issues, you emerge from the pack as not just another legal vendor but a valued business partner your clients turn to when in need.
The number, depth, and scope of legal industry challenges today are immense. Here are three your marketing can tap into now to capture the interest of even the busiest prospects.
1. Law Firms and Legal Departments Need to Prove their Value
Law firms now face intense pressure to prove their value to clients. Similarly, legal departments need to show the value they bring to their organization.
Clients and boards of directors demand cost-effective results, and they know technology and other resources can provide them. For example, no one can continue to justify the cost of thousands of hours of manual labor for activities that technology can perform much more efficiently and effectively.
Attorneys feel the heat of competition emanating from several directions. Altman Weil’s 2018 Law Firms in Transition Survey noted that “More work is going in-house, being redirected to non-law firm providers, and being redefined or eliminated through the application of technology. Commoditization, new technology tools, and non-traditional competitors are all permanent changes.”
With the right technologies, law firms and businesses increase their ability to compete. Data analytics and predictive technologies help them make more informed decisions about any number of issues including which cases to take and what research is the most persuasive. Automated processes produce the same or better results in minutes that it typically takes humans hours to generate. The right time-keeping software captures thousands of previously lost billing hours. The list goes on and on.
Show How You Help Them Help Their Clients
Law firm and legal department leaders notice when a product or service demonstrably improves their ability to create value for their clients. Especially when legal technology vendors are specific about how it happens.
The most often-repeated promotional saying is that a legal technology product or service saves users time, effort, and money. But, it’s such a common refrain these days that it no longer means anything.
Saving time, effort, and money is the bare minimum of an expected norm for technology vendors. It’s akin to saying, “We’re open. Come on in.” It’s nice. But it doesn’t do anything to differentiate you from the competition.
However. . .
Showing that your technology shaves hours off of tasks such document review which delivers consistent cost savings for your clients?
Bingo.
Demonstrating how your time tracking software provides the data points needed to generate more accurate alternative fee agreements?
Yes.
Or, showing how your practice management system transforms the tedious, data entry-intensive chores used to onboard new clients into a quick, easy automated process they and their new clients won’t dread?
Now you’re talking. And your prospects are finally listening.
It’s like providing your clients and prospective clients with the materials they need for their own marketing. Understand what your clients’ clients want, and you know what your clients care about most.
2. Data Privacy & Digital Security Responsibilities
Data privacy and digital security are not duties legal industry leaders take lightly. Law firms face serious security risks from a multitude of online threats including:
- Phishing and hacked email accounts
- Ransomware
- Data leaks
- Allegations of legal malpractice due to poor cybersecurity
Experian’s sixth annual Data Breach Industry Forecast singled out lawyers specifically as being easy prey to biometric, cloud, and phishing cyberattacks.
Online activities expose firms to security risks and vulnerabilities.
Not only are law firms and legal departments responsible for maintaining their own data security; they are also responsible for securing their clients’ data and guaranteeing confidentiality. This is a key challenge when they evaluate technology vendors because business reputations and law licenses are on the line.
Many attorneys need your help navigating digital security and data privacy. Email has been and will remain most lawyers’ preferred method of communication, no matter how fraught with security issues it is. Texts, instant messages, social media, and online chats present their own security risks and challenges.
A lot of legal work involves sharing electronic records, transferring files, preserving metadata, and so on. Digital contracts, eDiscovery, virtual data rooms, and cloud storage are here to stay.
How does using your technology help your clients deal with all the attendant security and privacy issues?
Some technologies eliminate the need to transfer files to third parties. Others reduce the number of data exposure points through a better collaborative set up. Cloud-based SaaS providers offer more enhanced and updated security measures compared to internally managed systems.
Discovering your advantages is a two-pronged effort:
- Identify the ways your technology enhances security efforts.
- Identify the ways it reduces security risks.
Both show the value your technology brings to your clients’ business in meaningful ways.
Identify how your #legaltechnology enhances security efforts & reduces security risks to show the value it brings to your clients’ business. Click To TweetDemonstrate Data Protection
Law firms are responsible for what happens to their clients’ data. They need to be able to demonstrate to clients and courts that they’ve taken every appropriate precaution.
Give them all the ammunition they need to prove using your product is completely defensible by freely sharing numerous details about your security and data privacy measures.
Many vendors dedicate an entire website page to how they address data security and privacy issues, including their data retention, backup, and recovery abilities. Also, state the specifics about any industry regulations you meet.
Don’t hesitate to pull out the tech-laden jargon and nerdy terminology. Lawyers are not intimidated by long words or complicated terms. (They get paid to create and interpret those tags on pillows, after all.)
I’m not saying to fill an entire page with dense walls of text or to ramble on incoherently. But go ahead and write to impress. Even if they don’t read or comprehend every detail, the simple fact that it’s there helps convince and assure analytical minds that you’ve gone to the lengths necessary to protect their business.
Continue to address security. 
Continue to sprinkle discussions about security into your blog posts, case studies, and other content. Of course, you won’t go to the depth you did on your dedicated security website page. That’s what internal linking is for, which — ding ding — makes Google gives you a thumbs up and a wink. Simply add links to your security page in the blog posts and other content when you discuss security issues.
Adding a link to your security page on your website’s primary menu is also a good option. If that doesn’t appeal to your style, just make sure that your website’s homepage and other important pages contain links to your dedicated security page.
3. Legal Technology: Globalization & Compliance
Globalization can affect your potential clients in many ways, even if it’s only through the need to respond to an increasingly complex regulatory environment.
Compliance and regulatory issues are chief pain points for companies doing business on a global scale. The legal department or outside counsel must decipher a quagmire of tangled rules and regulations with new ones popping up all the time. Multiple layers of regulations spread across numerous jurisdictions create a jigsaw of requirements that may at times be at odds with one another.
Lawyers have many reasons to collaborate with foreign counsel. Global M&As are on the rise. Law firms now, too, are forming more intercontinental mergers. Complex challenges arise when disparate financial, document management, contract management, knowledge management, data storage, and other business systems clash after a merger or acquisition.
For as many challenges that rear their ugly heads from the effects of globalization, just as many or more legal technology solutions rise up to meet them. Many technologies help law firms and businesses manage at least one and often multiple aspects of globalization challenges.
- Technology can be used to standardize files of any type.
- Artificial intelligence and automated technologies review, organize and classify documents, processing huge numbers of records quickly and efficiently.
- Secure online repositories and portals deliver needed records and information quickly to anyone across the globe.
- Through data analytics, decision-makers discover critical insights that help them develop more effective strategies.
- Other helpful features: Instant communications, the ability to monitor and track all levels of activities, easy-to-use, interactive dashboards, customizable reporting options, and on and on.
How does globalization affect your clients? And how does your technology brings advantages that allow your clients to work more effectively and efficiently on a global scale more easily than ever before?
From Legal Vendor to Valued Business Partner
The bottom line is that getting creative about the problems you solve requires that you see how your prospects view their businesses, whether they are a multi-billion dollar corporation, mid-size law firm, or solo attorney.
Talk to your clients and prospects, read surveys and studies, and stay up to date on the latest industry trends so you fully understand the challenges they face. (Shameless plug: Or partner with a copywriter who does.)
Highlight how your product or service increases the value your prospective clients bring to their clients, and point out new ways it can do so. Make them feel secure in today’s shaky world of digital security. Ensure they feel empowered to manage an increasingly complex and globalized future. In doing so, you transform yourself from just another legal industry vendor into a truly valued business partner.