Law Firm 4.0 Blog

New Website Case Study: Super Regional Firm Winstead (winstead.com)

Here is what 300-lawyer Winstead explains to website visitors, and it's why a buyer of legal services should take a look a them:

“Destination: Wherever you need to go” represents Winstead’s attitude, as well as the vastness of our experience and technical resources that clients rely on.  Clients in virtually all industries bring their challenges to Winstead and they keep coming back deal after deal, case after case, year after year as their organizations grow and change.

Entrepreneurs love us, because we are fast, nimble and competitively priced.  Corporate counsel depend on us because we have the sophistication, resourcefulness and deep know-how they need.  From practice to practice, Winstead attorneys deliver a consistent client experience—the most responsive attorneys you’ll hire, attorneys who know how to get things done, and business-friendly rates and fee arrangements that are aligned with the goals of the engagement.

In Texas, coast to coast and around the globe, Winstead is with you.

I've known the firm a long time and have worked with them since 2007, and I know all this to be true. 

The website strategy and theme (and really the underlying position of this law firm), "Destination: Wherever you need to go" is clear and elevating - for both the firm and its clients.  It was the foundation for all decisions made for this new website - features and functionality, design and imagery.

The previous site launched quickly, less than six months after Chief Marketing Officer Allen Fuqua arrived at the firm in 2007. Content Pilot planned and developed that site, too, but the design was initially  handled by another agency.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the new website, Allen and his core website team, Rachel Guy, Marketing Communications Manager, and Skye Samples, Marketing Communications & Web Coordinator, spent months interviewing firm leaders and key lawyers, gathering data about desired goals, objectives, features and functionality, look and feel. Connecting with multiple decision-makers in advance of the formal planning process saved considerable time, and we had a strong foundation of the right kind of input that would ultimately inform strategy, our feature set and design.

The over-arching goal was to present Winstead as a successful super-regional firm, and, within that, support the firm's business development strategies.  Fuqua says, "We identify targets, identify appropriate content for these targets and find the right distribution channels.  But then you have to convert them. The website has to be a place where there are multiple relationship opportunities for a visitor. How can the website provide connections for more?

"The site has to provide both experience and comfort.  Our home page accomplishes both."

We wanted the positioning to be evident from the get-go by featuring client stories/firm strengths from numerous vantage points: Houston and south Texas, Dallas/Fort Worth, central Texas (Austin/San Antonio), Charlotte, NC and Washington, DC. The home page rotating carousel features large format, saturated images and client case studies, some with video (both to humanize the visitor's experience and to tell more of the story).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winstead wanted a visitor from North Carolina to feel as "at home" on the site as a visitor from Houston or Dallas.  A first for a law firm website, we employed functionality called "localization," where visitors are presented with the following pop-up at the bottom of their screens:

 

 

Clicking "allow" will ensure that the image and client story that are delivered are geographically relevant to your location.  Charlotte visitors first see this home page:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 And Austin and San Antonio visitors see this:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The image ribbon below the gray bar enables visitors to view the other stories, and they will also rotate after a few seconds.  This localization feature adds to the comfort quotient in a "Winstead knows where we live and work" way.

Allen questions, "What is the viewer looking for? – what is the next step for that individual?  He or she could be wanting various levels of professional intimacy.  That was our primary goal for this website...  for it to become a relationship facilitator."

Sophisticated bio design is the best place to start. Allen continues,  "Relationship facilitation is where we have the greatest internal opportunity – to present and package content in ways that will be consumed by these visitors. We have the same piece of content, and we have packaged it as a webinar, podcast, news article, video, headline and in social media."  And they are all accessible on the lawyer bios.

Lawyer bios must answer the questions, "what have you done, for whom have you done it" and "why should I care?"  That's a tall order and most of the thousands of lawyer bios on the Web fail to deliver.  The buyer of legal services/lawyer relationship can begin right here.  Then, providing multiple channels in which a visitor can explore and engage what's inside the lawyer's brain, is the next step.

Several lawyers have video bios like partner and Chair of the Turnaround & Workout Industry Group, Frasher Murphy.  Allen's goal is for many more lawyers to jump in with video bios.  There are currently ten on the site, but the number will soon grow.

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

To keep both the marketing/business development team and the lawyers focused, Allen created this Content Marketing continuum, showing the prominence of the website in the firm's business development strategy:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Winstead.com also features videos about clients, such as Southwest Airlines and the Love Field Modernization program, and the George W. Bush Presidential Center, which visitors can access from the "noble cause" home page feature.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Many of the practice and industry descriptions were rewritten, with a focus on today's scanning reader and featuring client case studies. The energy law and energy litigation descriptions are excellent examples.

Website Roll-Out

Getting buy-in from lawyers can be challenging - there is a launch deadline, the lawyers are busy and their review often signals a blizzard of requested alterations. In this case, the marketing team started with the Managing Shareholder and COO, then previewed it with the Board of Directors.  The feedback was unanimously positive, so the team showed it to another 50 or so partners.  The reviews were equally enthusiastic.  By the time, Allen and his colleagues sent it to the rest of the firm for a two-week review, there was already a groundswell of support and excitement about launch. Allen said, "Showing it broadly to the firm was smart because lawyers uncovered typos and other tiny nitpicks that we wanted to fix. Lawyers weren't being critical - they were engaged and helpful."

Allen did roll-out presentations to staff, as well, ensuring that they understood the strategy behind it, and the team created an internal video alerting everyone it was "live."  He states, "We didn't receive one negative comment about it. Not one."

He says, "At launch, the site is operating at 30-60% of its potential; meaning, the ability to be a relationship builder.  We have barely scratched the surface of what this website can be for us.  It has such great upside and capability. We know that most websites are static – content, etc. - none of it changes much.  We can change the value we bring and the experience visitors will have with us in the lawyer bios, practice descriptions, and other pages of the site. We are fully committed to this."

 

 

Lawyers: The new measure of success? Where are you on the EP scale?

As a measure of success, EP is the new black.  Not just for lawyers, but for marketers, CIOs, financial advisors, anyone working today who wants to get farther faster.  It's kind of a magic bullet.

EP stands for "Executive Presence."  

In a new Strategy + Business article by Sally Helgesen, she breathes a sigh of relief when she notes that the "executive in the hoodie fad has passed its sell-by date of coolness."  Part of the reason is the enormous diversity of companies today, which are run by equally diverse CEOs and other senior executives.  As the hoodie has gone, so has the chiseled-jaw Mad Men-style leader.

According to Sylvia Van Hewlett, who has written a new book called, Executive Presence: The Missing Link Between Merit and Success, true EP is  "an ineffable blend of appearance, communication skills, and gravitas" — an important word that, as Helgesen says,"definitively declares the end of the hoodie era."

Strategy + Business author Helgesen writes, "I’d suggest that true leadership presence is rooted less in a combination of skills and characteristics than in the capacity to actually be present. That means being present for the moment, for others, for the mission, and for the task at hand. There’s a reason why the words 'presence' and 'present' have the same root."

She paints a picture that really struck me - she said that over the years, when walking into a room of people, she could always tell the most senior person in the room. It was the person who looked the least distracted, the one most able to focus on what was going on at that moment.  

Consider today, when walking into a room full of lawyers, marketers or tech professionals, all one sees is the tops of their heads, because everyone is head-down, fingering their devices. Everyone in the room in an instant becomes remarkably unimpressive. They are all the same. There is an opportunity for a leader to emerge in that room.  It could be any one of us - if we only pay attention to our EP - our executive presence.

Helgesen says, "This capacity to be present, to be unencumbered by logistical details or other distractions, gave the leaders I watched an appearance of freedom, authority, and ease. These are not qualities that can be coaxed forth by addressing the cosmetics of leadership presence: what we wear, how we walk, the relative firmness of our handshake, the timbre of our voice. All these things matter, but they alone cannot make someone who is unfocused seem like a leader. Conversely, individuals who at first glance appear unprepossessing can exude calm and authority if they are fully present."

She continues with the most important point of her article: "The irony is that our quest for efficiency, our desire to leave no task undone, has the ultimate effect of undermining our capacity to be fully engaged by what we do. So even as we work harder and improve our performance, we are eroding our capacity to inspire the trust and confidence required for sustainable success."

This is not new - we all know this.  The answer is understanding what "executive presence" means for you and having it become a part of your daily DNA.  Then, at the same time, be "present," whether you are on a conference call where you aren't seen (but you are heard - and we know you are multi-tasking), at a business development event or in a client meeting.  Keep your eyes forward and look people in the eyes.

I wrote a blog post a few years ago called "The Secret of Becoming a Rainmaker," where I write:

This post isn’t about telling you how to sell.  It’s about me finally articulating the one attribute that stands out among all others – the one attribute that enables lawyers, regardless of practice area, industry strength, personality type, communication style, law firm or law school credentials, to consistently and effectively develop client relationships that pay off.

Here it is:  Stop thinking about yourself. 

If you can do this, your executive presence will take care of itself.