Welcome to 2019! In the first New Year edition of Law Firm Disrupted, we look at how a law firm is using digital marketing campaigns to track its return on investment.

I'm Roy Strom, the author of this weekly briefing on the changing legal market, and you can tell me the ROI of this newsletter here or sign up to receive it here.

This Law Firm Went Through a 'Digital Marketing Transformation'

I'll be honest. I'm a bit of a sucker for the phrase “digital transformation.” Maybe it's the Dell commercials with the actor from HBO's Westworld. I know. It's wrong. It's buzzy. But I do think there's a lot of real digital change going on all around.

Take this college football bowl season, for instance. Using an ESPN app through Apple TV, I watched three bowl games on one screen at the same time. Happy New Year?

TV is probably one of the most obvious examples of what digital transformation really means: New ways to deliver services for customers.

The legal industry's transition to digital services is still in its infant stage. I know this briefing is aimed at Big Law legal services. But today I'd like to share a story from a plaintiffs firm that holds clues to what “digital transformation” might look like for big firms.

In short, it is a story about tracking your business in a way that leads to a better understanding of where your clients are coming from; what clients need and when; and how those clients prefer to be interacted with.

The story comes from New York-based Weitz & Luxenberg, which has about 100 lawyers and handles asbestos litigation, defective drug and medical devices cases, personal injury suits and other traditional plaintiff litigation.

Like most plaintiffs firms, Weitz & Luxenberg advertises through TV spots, pay-per-click web campaigns and banner advertisements directing people to a phone number. For the vast majority of the firm's 30-plus-year existence, this advertising was something like a shot in the dark.

“If the phones were ringing, great,” recalled Yehia Said, senior operations manager at the firm. “I guess that means the marketing is good.”

That state of affairs was unsatisfactory for William Denninger, who became Weitz & Luxenberg's director of business operations in early 2016. He wanted insight into whether the money the firm was spending on marketing was worthwhile. So he paired up with Jon Robinson, who is now president of a digital marketing company called Lunar.

Over the span of a couple years, Denninger, Robinson and Said built a system (primarily housed in Salesforce) that can track the firm's return on investment for any given ad campaign. It does that by detailed data collection, starting with capturing how the potential client got in touch with the firm and ultimately finishing with whether that client received a monetary award.

The data the system compiles help the team develop more accurate advertising campaigns. In one instance, the firm had signed up a pay-per-click web campaign for a particular type of litigation. The clickable web advertisement didn't get a lot of clicks. But the firm had also paired the banner ad with a new, specific phone number. That number was generating a lot of phone calls.

“We found the pay per click campaign drove people to the site, but people were picking up the phone and calling us rather than submitting web forms,” Denninger said. “In the past, we might have thought this was an unsuccessful pay per click campaign. It turns out, the preferred method of contact was telephone, and it's been a very successful campaign for us. And normally that would have been terminated.”

The firm says its client base has grown by 30 percent since the introduction of its newer, more targeted ad campaigns. Denninger said it's a competitive advantage to know what types of advertising are most likely to lead to responses.

“Firms that advertise heavily to get their cases in the door are beginning to recognize the importance of data collection on marketing and whether or not your marketing efforts are effective,” Denninger said.

While Weitz & Luxenberg's advertising tracking may not offer a perfect model for Big Law, it illustrates how collecting data on your clients and tracking those clients' results can open up great insights.

Big Law firms can do this, too.

Experience management platforms like Foundation Software track the types of cases law firms bring in; how they are handled; and by whom. They can even track outcomes. But to take advantage, law firms need to reinforce for lawyers and staff the importance of capturing the relevant data. That's because if there a more significant “digital transformation” at major law firms, data is bound to be driving it.

Roy's Reading Corner

On The Year in Legal Tech: Veteran legal tech observer Bob Ambrogi looks back on 2018 and picks out the 20 most important developments in the legal tech world to happen during the past year. No. 1 on his list? Data analytics. Ambrogi focuses on the development of new types of legal analytics rolled out by the likes of Lexis Nexis and Thomson Reuters.

He writes: “if you judge the most important technology by its direct impact on the practice of law, then it would have to be analytics. As I suggested in a recent column, we could be nearing the point where it would be malpractice for a lawyer not to use analytics.”

On Law Firm Mergers: Another year, another record. That's the way it feels if you're tracking the quantity of law firm mergers, which my colleague Dan Packel reported on this week. Both the industry's leading tabulators of law firm transactions—Altman Weil and Fairfax Associates—say 2018 set a record. To me, the “more-more-more” merger story has been a bit unsatisfying in recent years, since most of the “mergers” involve small law firms. Here's to hoping that 2019 brings a mega-merger or two involving an Am Law merger of equals. Oh, and let me know if you've heard of one in the works.

On 2019: The American Lawyer staff, including yours truly, wrote up our yearly predictions for various aspects of the legal market. Covered in the package: Innovation, mental health, revenue growth, talent management and law firm mergers. I've already received a lot of feedback on this one, so let me know what you think if I haven't heard from you. And Happy New Year!