Tuesday, September 3, 2013

The Dangers of One-Off 'Annual' Law Firm Reports


This week, I am liking law firm annual reports. More specific than firm brochures, these curated compilations of yearly accomplishments can provide some insight into a firm’s priorities, or at least into who is winning the battle for promotion.

Could these nice tomes be far more specific and provide office-to-office comparisons? Yes. Might losses or poor choices be chronicled? Absolutely. What I pay attention to is what’s not mentioned in the annual report. Or who is not mentioned. Which practice groups are given scant attention?

Then, too, firms that have issued annual reports once but haven’t issued subsequent ones make me wonder, What has changed? What is going wrong?

One report I like both for its relative financial candor and for its boldness in making yearly annual reports easily accessible is that of Clifford Chance. Reports from 2008 to 2012 are easily viewed.

Duane Morris features an “Annual Report” button on its home page, but when I clicked it, the most recent report I was able to access was issued for the year 2011. We’re a good way through 2013. What did the firm do in 2012?

I wasn’t able to find Nixon Peabody’s annual report on its website without a fair amount of hunting. There was no “annual report” button, and nothing easily identifiable as one came up when I searched the site for it. Ultimately, I googled “Nixon Peabody annual report” and found it posted on the site of a marketing partner. Then I returned to the Nixon Peabody site and found it here. It’s buried in the list of “Additional Brochures” on its Brochures page.  It’s not really identified as an annual report, but it chronicles a lot of accomplishments from 2009. Four years later, I wonder where the update is and why it hasn’t been issued.

A problem with reporting can be that once you’ve started reporting, you can’t stop. It’s got to be an annual occurrence. If you skip a year, or bury the report deep in your website, have you hurt your marketing more than you’ve helped it?

—Lori Tripoli

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