Time to ditch the PR strategy for dummies if you want to build your practice profile

Do you have a media strategy for pushing forward your main practice groups? Well, if you are an ambitious UK top 50 practice or major US law firm, the answer is almost certainly 'yes'. But is it working? To that question, the response in many cases remains 'no'.

There are a number of reasons strategies to build deal teams' profiles fail. Common ones would include unreasonable expectations or a misconceived sense of what you are trying to achieve.

A greater failing that often holds back law firms' media efforts is the confusion between quality and quantity in terms of media relationships, with law firms typically achieving the latter at the expense of the former. This is because many firms run a media strategy for their practice groups on the number of times their partners are quoted in general articles – a kind of punditometer. Some firms go as far as tracking this stuff in graphs and centralised folders and using the results as some form of key performance indicator.

This would be fine, apart from the small problem that it often doesn't work. This kind of strategy is the commoditised end of PR – it can deliver volume but rarely value, unless it's very fast-moving and rigorously targeted.

This approach also tends to generate partner quotes in practice areas that don't drive revenues. The easiest way to get your partner quoted in a newspaper is to focus on employment, pensions and, to a lesser extent, antitrust and financial services regulation.

But these areas are outside the trinity of M&A, banking and property that drives commercial firms' revenues (though competition and regulatory are at least high-value, partner-driven practice areas). This means when firms are getting attention, it is for areas outside their core business and brand.

The second problem is larger. This form of profile-building is extremely diffused. If you pull it together in a cuttings folder or a graph, it looks good – but to the casual business reader or client, it is unlikely to penetrate their conscience. Good for partner egos, less so for business.

In press, context and quality matters hugely. That means there is a world of difference between firing off a few press-released quotes and getting your sports supremo a briefing with a quality broadsheet sports desk that turns into a profile or a series of well-contextualised quotes on the big stories in that area.

Here's the formula that works. Identify the practice areas in which the firm is strong and that cross over with the business news agenda and then identify which partners have actual charisma, or at least solid social skills, and push them forward to build relationships with your target media outlets. This Praetorian Guard for your practice brands will have to get used to being available to the media, which means returning calls and building trust with selected journalists – and being able to express an opinion without 57 caveats.

You also have to sweat a bit for media profile. Law is fragmented as an industry – getting front and centre with target media isn't going to just happen, no matter how many cowering PRs the partners berate.

Do you have to run this strategy? Of course not. But you may want to bear in mind that Slaughter and May has for years been one of the most astute cultivators of its deal professionals' profiles – and that seems to have turned out pretty well so far.