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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