Peer to Peer Magazine

operations while implementing and maintaining the technology necessary to enable it, competing firms who have such staff have a big advantage. To supplement a dearth of internal marketing talent, some firms retain outside agencies that work with a marketing partner or marketing committee comprising lawyers from various practice areas who try to guide the firm's efforts. According to Justin Ogglesby, Associate Director of Social Media with Hall Marketing Communications, this is not always the best formula for success: "While many legal marketing committees or individuals have received training or education in emerging technologies, participation from the majority of the firm is required to have significant impact. Education transfer from agency to committee and committee to individual lawyers is often a sore spot among small to medium-sized law firms. Social networking and content distribution among individual lawyer networks is a difficult process to implement. Oftentimes, senior partners fail to adopt these practices, creating an unfortunate ripple effect throughout the law firm. Ultimately, this results in the initiative failing not due to strategy but lack of participation." The Great Divide Larger firms usually have the luxury of fully staffed marketing and IT departments. However, we often hear about the disconnect between these two groups. As teams, they speak completely different languages. For example, when marketing says e-marketing, IT hears blacklists; when marketing says Facebook campaign, IT hears bandwidth bottleneck; and, when marketing says new logo, IT hears template changes and signature blocks. No wonder there's a communication challenge. With increased dependencies on technology, firms with separate IT and marketing departments often are urged to blend or better align to maximize efforts and deliver better value. While a combined strategy such as this can work in principle, the reality is when there are a large number of technology projects driven by other departments with higher priorities, marketing becomes the lowest priority for receiving technology resources. Peer to Peer 33

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