Vanity publishing sucks

All too often law firms’ websites (invariably still brochure-ware, however fancy) and their updates and bulletins are more about the law firm and its lawyers, and less about the target audience. At best this is an irritation, and at worse a definite turn off. I know, as I regularly receive unsolicited updates from accountants and property advisers: most of them, if soft copy, are now routed seamlessly into Junk Mail (I have only recently discovered this very useful application in Outlook); if hard copy, they find their way unread into the recycling bin in very short order.

I follow these rules

Think about who your target audience is
Think about what they have told you they want (and not just what you think they want)
Think about how what you are going to tell them will help them (as well as helping you)
Think about what you want to say
Think about the best delivery channel

and then make sure that it only goes to those people to whom it should go (see earlier my post Mailing list hell).

The Gadarene swine

I am not sure which was worse: that MPs decided to keep their allowances or that Gordon Brown and most of the cabinet stayed away, and that a number of senior cabinet ministers voted with the troughing pigs. Only five, Yvette Cooper, John Denham, Jack Straw, Des Browne and Harriet Harman voted for the reform of the arrangements.

See Nick Robinson’s post, Heroes to zeroes?.

Not that long ago, a senior Labour MP, no doubt seeking to put a gloss on the behaviour of her fellow MPs, of all parties, remarked that she believed all MPs went into politics determined to make a difference, and help people. It seems that helping oneself first is what it is really all about. But it was ever thus.

Asleep at the wheel

A damning article by Luke Johnson in this morning’s FT, Bank leaders are a disgrace to capitalism. Johnson reserves his special contempt for RBS,

“Bank directors are not under-rewarded. The six executive directors at Royal Bank of Scotland, for example, took home £16m in cash last year – on top of their accumulated pension entitlements of £26m. These are not entrepreneurs who risk their own capital in life – they are just bank employees. That sort of cash should buy geniuses who never fail. It should pay for leaders who understand the larger role RBS plays in the system, and the vital contribution it makes in financing the private sector, since it claims it has the number one brand in corporate banking.

Yet in undertaking the “largest banking acquisition ever” by buying ABN Amro after the market had begun to turn, RBS has destroyed value and its management credibility on a breathtaking scale. How can they dare to withdraw facilities and berate borrowers when no one has been sacked for such gargantuan incompetence? How do the bosses retain the confidence of their staff, clients and stockholders? RBS was forced into a rescue £12bn rights issue in spite of saying it did not need one. The arrogance of certain of our top bankers is a disgrace to capitalism, while many of the board members of the Big Five appear to have been asleep at the wheel in the past couple of years.”

Yet only a few weeks ago, one of the senior local managers of the bank was telling everyone that the “success” of the rights issue meant that they now had plenty of money to lend. Quite unbelievable.

Spending time wisely

An interesting report by Economics Editor Chris Giles in this morning’s FT, that ‘data show that confidence is down but consumer and business behavious tells another story’. He suggests that ‘the gap between action and sentiment puts the economy at a tipping point’.

We are certainly seeing this day to day: work continues, but ask anyone about what happens next and the outlook is decidedly gloomy. At a lavish corporate event last week, to which I took one of my daughters, she was most surprised not by the artwork on display but by, to her, the incongruity of unlimited champagne and the chorus of doom-sayers quaffing it.

There are various steps that we can take in our practices to see us through the slowdown, whether it be long or short. In an email circular last month, Nick Jarrett-Kerr of Kerma Partners, identified “where partners should be spending their time during a market turndown” as

skills building
steam-lining and re-engineering work
getting even closer to clients
getting involved in internal projects
motivating and developing their precious assets [their teams]

Most partners see fee-earning as their key task, and in most practices this is the case, but, as Jarrett-Kerr notes, ‘the silver lining in the recessional cloud may be that at last the excuses have been removed for partners avoiding to engage in valuable non chargeable work’.

Devon fudge

In a recent interview, the managing partner of Bond Pearce, commenting on the announcement of the closure of the firm’s Exeter office, explained

We are committed to the Devon practice. What I would say to them is ‘look at what the clients are saying to us’, which is that they are looking for a different sort of offering from us, which does not require us to be in every city in every part of our region.

So far so good, but these brave words are only a little undermined by the (unconfirmed) report that although Bond Pearce is moving out of Southernhay Gardens, it is still intending to have a “box on the motorway” at Exeter, to see clients, and no doubt to allow its Exeter based partners to avoid having to flog down the A38 everyday.

As the Chief Executive of another Devon firm told me last week, “It’s just a fudge”.