Promoting the Solicitor Brand-Membership Board from Linda Lee, President of the Law Society

As you will all know, promoting the excellent work that solicitors do is a key theme of my Presidency.

I attended the Membership Board meeting on Thursday. Among the matters considered were the results of the publicity campaign promoting the brand of solicitor.

I was delighted to see the positive results that our 2010 solicitor brand promotion campaign generated. The campaign ran for two months with a budget of £500,000. As a result of that we secured £1.2 million of media space. Our PR campaign delivered £1,044,518 worth of additional PR value – meaning that the total value of advertising and PR secured for the Law Society was £2,244,518. An exceptional result.

We drove 85,229 members of the public looking for legal advice to our website and our find a solicitor search engine, while we despatched 809,478 promotional ideas to firms who visited our ‘promote your practice’ webpage when the campaign was launched. All in all this is a great result for the Law Society and the profession as we seek to promote the value of solicitors to the public.

At the end of the campaign, questionnaires were sent to all the firms who had ordered our campaign materials. The results were overwhelmingly positive with 88 of 126 respondents reporting that the campaign was of practical value to their practice, 103 stating they thought the message was right and 114 saying the Law Society should run more campaigns like this.

We’ll be putting more information about this on the website and I’ll keep you updated.

The new Board chaired by David Taylor also had a brainstorming session to look at ideas to support the profession but also generate income. Those of you who have heard me speak in the last year will know that a recurring theme is the need to generate income so that we may continue and expand our representational work such as the court action on legal aid. However there is also a need to develop work aimed at supporting the profession; for example in relation to exit strategies for those firms who are in the unhappy position of finding themselves no longer financially viable or those who wish to retire and cannot find a successor practice and are finding closure complex and costly. Ideas were also generated following the Chair’s attendance at the outsourcing conference.