Changing Reporter Landscape Affecting Legal Marketing

The pandemic has, of course, changed the ways law firms market themselves, though "The Great Plague" is only one factor. After a fallow period at the height of the pandemic, legal marketing departments are growing again — as I write, more than 100 jobs have been posted in the last month on the Legal Marketing Association website — and job descriptions are getting more and more specific. There are, scores of professionals who do nothing but prepare nominations for the various awards doled out by ALM, the Chambers Legal guides, and other legal and news media. (I have been known to refer to some of the less impressive of these salutes as "Best Employment Lawyer Working in Conshohocken on a Rainy Tuesday." Many of my colleagues would agree.)

For a marketer focused on media relations — as your author has been for some 29 years — the journalistic landscape is very different now from what it was in 1994, and it affects the practice of media relations. For just as legal marketing departments have been growing, newsrooms have been shrinking. The journalism industry is in serious trouble, as readers nationally surely are aware. When I arrived in Philadelphia to serve Duane Morris in 2004, just up Broad Street was a landmark tower housing the city's Pulitzer Prize-winning daily, The Philadelphia Inquirer. That paper included more than 20 reporters focused on business, including the business of law, and it was not all that difficult to get the attention of the legal reporter, the banking reporter, the pharma or health care reporter, or the housing reporter, depending on which of my law firm's clients or industries had an issue in court or in a deal room.