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Bar Associations: How can we open them up to society and further the prestige of the profession?

by Francesc Dominguez

Question by Carlos Carnicer, Chairman of the Consejo General de la Abogacía Española [General Council for the Spanish Legal Profession] and of Unión Profesional

We trust the people we know best. Perception is the door to business and opportunities. If the capacity of a professional group is recognised by society, this group gains opportunities.

Bar Associations should not just know and communicate strategic significance to society, what their basic benefit is, but also the profession’s. In my case, for example, it is “competitiveness for professional service firms”; Competitiveness based on a humanistic marketing, focusing on values of respect for people.

Bar associations should build their social positioning strategies on the basis of this strategic significance. The lack of knowledge and dissemination of this essential benefit or brand promise is equivalent to a diffuse positioning of the profession, or, what amounts to the same thing, lost opportunities as a group in the short term and loss of prestige in the long term. It is also equivalent to facilitating a gateway to certain professions, competitors, with a more market-oriented approach and sometimes a more aggressive one.

Perception is “what makes or breaks us” on the market. Thus, it must be managed with rigour. Marketing is often confused with advertising, press or public relations actions. These are very visible marketing actions, but are still only actions. Action without strategic reflection is of little use.

Strategy is prior to action. In the society or economy of meaning, each profession should find its meaning in society, how it wants to be and can honestly be perceived, what its values are and what is understood by them, what its basic brand promise is for society and for clients in particular. There is no positioning without meaning, and no positioning means lost opportunities.

The brand should not just be managed externally, but also, and fundamentally, it should be managed internally for the actual professional group. Conveying a culture of communication to bar members is a way of publicising the benefits of the professional brand to society. The actual professionals are ultimately responsible for promoting their group. To achieve a culture of communication, we must seek support among young people or veterans with a young spirit, who are still enthusiastic and passionate about the group.

Perception of the practice of law

Many lawyers often say that “the lawyer is the most qualified legal advisor or assessor”. Nevertheless, the question is: Does society perceive the lawyer as the most qualified assessor, as their first option? Is the value for quality/service/price offered by lawyers the most highly rated? Is the social utility of the law profession clearly known?

If lawyers are the best qualified professionals as legal advisors, why do potential clients sometimes choose the services of other professionals? Because there is a social perception or belief that other professional groups can solve certain affairs better and for less than the fees charged by lawyers. Regardless of whether or not this is true, the belief exists. And there is still the classic association of the lawyer with legal activities (legal actions), although not so much as in the past, largely reinforced by the image industry (television and cinema).

Maintaining the prestige, the social consideration, of a profession, is crucial in ensuring that the social demand for it does not wane. Reality and social perception are often at odds. When the identity (reality) and image (social) of a professional group do not match, the group in question has a problem of image, of positioning in society.

The profession’s identity

In my opinion, the law profession should be perceived as a close profession, albeit without “close” meaning a loss of respect by society or by the groups that collaborate with lawyers, for example judges. The identity of a profession, its personality and values, cannot be left to the ebb and flow of the market. If, out of idleness or lack of communicative capacity, the essential values of a profession become hazy, the latter will gradually lose its personality, essence, that which defines and makes it different.

Failure to manage the professional brand leaves the future of the brand in the hands of the market, relentless, or of some professional service companies with great communicative capacity driven exclusively by business profit, mercantilist criteria. These companies, competing on the basis of low prices, contribute to the proletarisation of certain professions, such as law, and to its loss of prestige. In this regard, the communication campaigns of bar associations could offset these purely business-driven strategies by communicating that quality has its price, or the recognition of the work of professionals, which also means time.

The identity (personality and values) of a profession such as law should be explicitly known and persuasively communicated, as we hire or recruit professionals according to their perception and that of the group to which they belong. We make our hiring decisions on the basis of perception. This communicative effort is not only a duty of associations, but mainly of law practices: when (potential) clients realise the service capacity of law firms, new business possibilities open up for the latter.

Associations: commitment and determination of the deans

It is surprising that in the economy of meanings there are bar associations that either do not manage perception or confuse it with media management, the publication of ads or the organisation of PR events. In other cases they manage it in a rather unprofessional fashion, outsourcing it to voluntary professionals, mostly non-professionals of marketing and communication. If associations professionalise their management, they will contribute to ensuring that the legal profession is perceived as more modern, adapted to the times.

Language creates perception, and should therefore be managed with rigour, at the highest possible level in bar associations. The proper management of the perception of a group is the responsibility of the dean and the governing board. Thus, experts in communication strategy should report directly to the dean or the board.

The different bar associations tend to associate social communication with the availability of a press office or a news insert in the press. It is obvious that achieving presence in the press brings short-term results, and if implemented continuously it contributes to forming and/or creating public opinion. Nevertheless, this activity should be part of a strategic global communication plan with a long-term orientation. Perceptions are changed with long-term orientation by means of the “service experience” of the clients with the professionals and with communication in the framework of a global marketing strategy.

Improve perception

If a professional group seeks to improve its social perception, its “reality” should improve. If the law profession wishes to improve its image and project the profession to society, it should communicate how society, which makes its very existence possible, benefits from it. There are some basic factors:

1. The law practice needs to know its real image in society. Professional associations must draw up studies geared towards knowing the evolution of the social perception of the profession. The General Council for the Spanish Legal Profession falls into this line, periodically drawing up a study on the image of the profession.

2. The law profession must define and disseminate, within a new legal framework, what its core mission or raison d’ être, its values, are. The law profession should know what its identity is: what is the law profession? what benefits does it offer society? how does it wish to be perceived (expected image)?

3. The General Council for the Spanish Legal Profession, as it has been doing, and bar associations and lawyers, should embrace communication with society as one of its values if it wishes to make a solid contribution to explaining the work and the utility of the law profession to the citizens. The figure and the functions of the lawyers should be brought closer to society. The law profession should recover its social influence. Associations must “become integrated” in their geographical setting, become a social reference. It must communicate, and do it well.

In a few words, to get the “lawyer” brand to be better appreciated, a constant communication effort needs to be made within the framework of a strategic marketing plan. Isolated local activities, like those of some dynamic bar associations, are positive but insufficient. There must be a global strategy, implemented with rigor and method at local level by the associations and also, why not, by law practices, since the latter must be involved in the process of publicising the social function of the law profession.
The main competitor of the law profession is the profession itself.

© 2007, Francesc Domínguez, marketing consultant. www.francescdominguez.com. Note by the author: advice page published in the Economist & Jurist review (October, 2007). A part of this text is based on my opinion article “Imagen social de la abogacía” (the economic daily Expansión, 2002).

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Bar Associations: How can we open them up to society and further the prestige of the profession?

by Francesc Dominguez