Law: She sells more than brochures: Lynn Hill believes that law firms are starting to view marketing professionals as a benefit, not an overhead

A MARKETING professional with a knowledge of other disciplines is a useful asset to a law firm. When Lynn Hill arrived at the City firm Taylor Joynson Garrett in November 1991 as head of marketing, she had worked with both accountants and surveyors.

The biggest culture shock of her professional life came when she moved from the accountancy firm to the surveyors. She says: 'Accountants and solicitors go hand in hand in many ways. Their relationships with their clients and the way their partnerships work are very similar. But surveyors are highly sales-oriented. The majority are agents and act like agents. Strategy doesn't come into their view of marketing.'

Surveyors, Ms Hill says, see marketing people as aliens whose job is merely to produce brochures and run databases.

Her work with the accountancy firm, however, provided her with a firm foundation in the kind of marketing skills required by law firms. Both types of partnership are made up of collections of individuals, to whom the marketing director acts to some extent as consultant.

But successful marketing, Ms Hill says, depends crucially on the marketing director being part of the management process. And although she works closely with her managing partner and says partnerships generally are starting to appreciate the need for management structures, the marketing

director often has to fight for recognition of his or her strategic function. This might include exploring ways of promoting the partnership's expertise and expanding its client base.

Yet marketing plans stretching over one or two years do not tend to find favour.

Solicitors need to identify their business aims, Ms Hill says. 'It's relatively new for law firms to think in terms of business plans. But without them, marketing strategies cannot be put in place.'

And Once the partnership acknowledges that a business plan is a natural part of the management process, and that a marketing director is there to assist with business development, 'they treat you better'.

Solicitors have to some extent learnt from the mistakes made by accountants. The rules governing marketing and advertising in accountancy firms were relaxed three years earlier than those governing solicitors. And in the early days of deregulation, public relations people, rather than marketing professionals, were brought in to produce brochures and run social functions. 'These are an end product of marketing,' Ms Hill says, 'and should be the result of planning.'

Such hiring policies gave true marketing professionals a bad name and many firms started designating a partner to be responsible for marketing instead; the result was that they became very inward-looking. One effect was that the firms' publications came to be written for the lawyer rather than the client.

'Things have now changed, at least in the larger firms, which have on the whole brought in people such as myself - professionals,' Ms Hill says.

She has put across her belief that brochures, for instance, should be written only as part of an overall strategy rather than because an individual decides he or she wants one. It is a learning process, but in the past few years the big firms have broken through, she believes.

Most marketing staff in law firms seem to agree that those who do not earn a fee for the firm tend to be perceived as an overhead rather than a benefit. 'Oddly enough, the recession is helping to change this attitude,' Ms Hill says. 'People have become more willing to discuss ways of generating business.'

This is one area in which solicitors have overtaken accountants. Solicitors have actively had to look for new business; accountants can rely to a large extent on the regularity of their bread and butter audit work coming in.

'Solicitors have to work twice as hard to keep their clients - they need to do a good job for them to come back. An accountant's audit client tends to keep going unless something goes very wrong,' Ms Hill says.

But accountants have out-performed lawyers as far as cross-selling is concerned. They are more aware of their client base, she feels, whereas lawyers tend to work in isolation with their clients. They have also been slow to acquire a real knowledge of their markets.

The status of the non-lawyer working in a legal practice has long been a thorny issue, but things are improving, Ms Hill says. 'I am taken seriously in the right quarters, but there are a number of cynics. It is impossible to get all 63 of our partners to follow me.'

The answer is to build up one's own credibility. 'You've got to give before you take. I found I had to give a lot up-front. And I am constantly side-tracked into firefighting. Every day there is some kind of crisis I have to deal with, helping a partner prepare a presentation for winning new business, for instance. But with such a large number of people in the firm, reactive marketing is inevitable.'

The important things, she believes, are never to lose sight of one's goals and to learn to say 'no' occasionally.

Reactive marketing can also be turned to advantage. 'At the moment I'm involved with work on our corporate identity,' Ms Hill says. 'We are moving to new premises in March, so we are having to rewrite everything from brochures to headed paper. It's perfect timing. I am using it as an opportunity to make the firm go back to basics, think about its strengths and opportunities for the next few years and say, 'Will the real Taylor Joynson Garrett please stand up?' '

(Photograph omitted)