Marketing is a way of operating and managing in a company oriented towards the market and the customer. Marketing activities are efforts to promote activities and acquire new customers, i.e. activities supporting the sale of products and services, carried out using various methods and techniques of influencing the buyer. The term marketing first appeared in the United States.
A lawyer is a person who completed a law degree, i.e. acquired theoretical knowledge in the field of law at a university of his choice, but does not have the title of a legal advisor or attorney.
A legal advisor is a person after defending his master's degree (in the field of law), who has passed the entrance examination for the application, completed this apprenticeship, passed the professional exam with a positive result and was entered on the list of legal advisers. The Act on legal advisers (of 6 July 1982, Journal of Laws No. 19, item 145, as amended) regulates the profession of legal adviser as well as the activity of the self-government of legal advisers.
An attorney is a person who, after graduation and obtaining a master's degree, has completed an apprenticeship, just like a legal counsel, and successfully passed the professional exam obtaining the title of an attorney-at-law and was entered on the list of attorneys. The exercise of the profession of an advocate and the activity of the advocate's self-government are regulated by the Act of May 26, 1982, Law on the Bar (Journal of Laws No. 16, item 124, as amended).
In conclusion, every solicitor and attorney is a lawyer, but not every lawyer is a solicitor or barrister.
According to ethics, the ban on advocacy or legal adviser advertising has been an issue that has aroused many controversies for years, not only in Poland, but also in the European Union. In Poland, it is forbidden to promote your services through advertising.
The Set of Principles, Barristers' Ethics and Professional Dignity, i.e. the Code of Bar Ethics, in paragraph 23, indicates that an advocate is prohibited from using advertising, as well as from acquiring clients in a manner contrary to the dignity of the profession and cooperation with entities acquiring clients in violation of the law or the principles of social coexistence. The profession of an advocate is adopted as a profession of public trust and plays an important public role.
The Code of Ethics of the Legal Counsel does not explicitly prohibit advertising. Nevertheless, the function of a quasi-ban is fulfilled by the restriction of information expressed in Art. 32 of the Code of Ethics of Attorney-at-Law, which conceptually also covers advertising and other forms of marketing only for activities consistent with good manners and consistent with the dignity of the profession.
Advertising is a paid form of presenting services, products or ideas. Its task is to influence the motives of consumers when choosing them and the attitudes and behavior of consumers. Under the influence of advertising, consumers are to make a decision to buy the advertised product or the presented service.
The law office of the attorney-at-law or the law office may not:
Considering the above, legal marketing requires looking at advertising (promotion) in a completely different way. Based on typically informative content, the purpose of which is to build the firm's reputation and shape its professional image, i.e. competences and experience. In marketing for lawyers, the praise for the advantages of law firms is abandoned.
The basis in legal marketing is the website, which is a professional business card of the law firm on the web. A properly drafted lawyers website should be:
Legal marketing is mainly based on advisory services combined with exposing the knowledge and experience of a given law firm.
Positioning a website for legal marketing is optimization (to the client's needs for the needs of search engines) in terms of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). That is, the selection of appropriate keywords (information) - the ones that potential clients of the law firm enter into the search engine, for example Google.
Google My Company, i.e. a business card on Google, is a great tool for the promotion of law firms. A Google business card (Google My Business) allows, with little effort, to increase the visibility of the office on the web and in search results and on Google maps. It is worth paying attention to the optimization of the business card. This will help to effectively promote legal activity, focusing on building your image both on and off the web.
It is worthwhile for lawyers to invest in the so-called awareness of your brand and promotion of information about your innovative styles of managing customer affairs. Content marketing, i.e. content marketing, is a tool that allows you to directly reach a potential group of customers by publishing high-quality content, attractively describing what it does or what it offers.
In the 21st century, presence in social media has a decisive influence on the pace of the law firm's development. Therefore, when planning a marketing strategy, it is worth spending a bit more time building a communication strategy with recipients in social media.
14 million Poles use Facebook every day. Facebook Ads is an advertising system that allows you to display advertising content to precisely selected groups of recipients.
It should be remembered that, unfortunately, according to the regulations, doctors and lawyers cannot promote their activities. In this case, is advertising on Facebook completely prohibited?
Advertising through Facebook Ads is out of the question, but informing about your services is. Running a fan page on FB may be conducted in accordance with the law. The key is to refrain from aggressive promotion. Posts posted on the portal must be purely informative, without e.g. describing your services as the best or the cheapestych.
Being present on LinkedIn is now an obligation for every representative of the legal industry (lawyer, attorney-at-law, attorney-at-law, notary public, debt collection company) who wants to conduct online marketing activities (with little cost and time).
Having an Instagram account has many advantages in the legal industry as well. Instagram is another place on the web, right after Facebook, where you can show yourself as a person and your business as a lawyer, building your brand recognition.
It is worth for the website to have a blog module with a systematically supplemented entry. The article should explain the issues of interest to customers, comment on changes in regulations and explain legal complexities or react to the latest changes. Going further, it is worth investing in a very popular Vlog, i.e. videoblog. Where vlog is an internet movie journal that has an informative or educational role. It plays an important role in legal marketing by sharing their knowledge among lawyers.
Lawyers who have a website come at some point to a situation in which they have to make a decision regarding legal marketing and choose the exact method of "advertising" their services in order to comply with the principles of lawyers' ethics (the Code of Ethics, the Code of Ethics and the Dignity of the Profession). Advocate and the Code of Ethics of the Legal Counsel). It is worth investing in a specialized agency that will raise your legal marketing to a higher level. This will allow you to obtain professional results and consistency in your marketing. The advantage of outsourcing legal marketing is:
Katarzyna Neczaj
SalesWizard.pl editor, specialist in CRM products - LegallyCRM.pl, SolarCRM.pl, MLMseed.pl and SalesWizard.pl