Placement Report for Certificate in Digital Marketing & Media Management

Dundalk Institute of Technology, Dundalk, Co. Louth

‘APPLYING DIGITAL MARKETING METHODOLOGY TO LOCAL LAW PRACTICE’

Portfolio: Michelle B. Cowley

Student No.: D00189167 | Date of Submission: 10th August 2016

Company:

Dorothy J. Walsh Solicitors & Company

Supervising Lecturer:

Anthony Murray (& Kate Johnston)

CONTENTS

1. ORGANISATIONAL DETAILS AND STRUCTURE

1.1 Services & Target Market

1.2 Staffing, Duties, & Structure of the Company

1.3 Extra-Legal Activities, Chairing of Non-Profit Boards, & Volunteering

2. LEARNER’S DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

2.1 Specific Case-Study – Dorothy J. Walsh Solicitors & Company Website

2.2 Key Task Components

2.3 What Worked Well and What Challenges Had to Be Overcome

2.4 Personal and Professional Development

3. LINKING THEORY TO PRACTICE

4. EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE

5. BIBLIOGRAPHY

6. APPENDICES

1. ORGANISATIONAL DETAILS AND STRUCTURE

Dorothy J. Walsh Solicitors & Associates is a legal practice based in Fair Street,

Drogheda Co. Louth. Established in 2009, the practice provides legal advice and

representation in all areas of general legal practice including: Employment Law,

Company Law and Corporate Governance, Health and Safety Law, Family Law,

Criminal Defence, Civil Litigation, Wills and Probate, Personal Injury and Medical

Negligence Law, and all aspects of Conveyancing and Land Law.

The offices are based in Fair Street, Drogheda – a traditional property holding

for a legal, or indeed a medical or a financial, practice drawing cliental from

Drogheda and its environs. Opposite the Old Drogheda Courthouse, and surrounded

by other legal and financial service practitioners, Fair Street presents a location

simultaneously providing a regular stream of business as well as a pool of

established and emerging competition including the family firms: Branigan &

Matthews, Callan’s, and Monaghan’s amongst others.

1.1 Services & Target Market

While each provides a general practitioner service, Dorothy J. Walsh Solicitors &

Company specialises in Advocacy, Licensing, and Civil Litigation in particular. Of

recent note is growth in the share of family law cases recommended to their offices,

in a climate that engenders an increasing focus on family and the law for solicitors

more generally. Moreover, additional practice accreditation stemming from

certification in Criminal Litigation, and District Court Practice and Procedure means

that cases presented to their offices are increasingly likely to be those that require

settlements in court as opposed to settlements out of court. That said, in terms of a

present cliental, their business flow draws heavily on regional demand, most notably

from private law, family law, and high impacting regional advocacy cases.

The target market presents with both high-end and everyday legal problems,

more often than not requiring legal advice, or mandatory solicitor services, such as

those adjunct to house purchasing, employment law, and wills and probate.

Essentially this practice, and all competing general practitioners of law, will take on

any legal work sought unless procedures, professional conflict of interest, or

jurisdiction prevent that possibility.

1.2 Staffing, Duties, & Structure of the Company

The company consists of one full-time solicitor Dorothy J. Walsh BA DipLaw, one full-

time legal secretary, an accountant, and a list of associate solicitors and barristers to

which case-work specific expertise requirements prompt out-sourced or expediated

solution. All full-time and associate staff members and affiliates of the company are

accredited with full and updated continuous professional development courses on all

aspects of law change and review, legal secretarial work where relevant, or

contemporary issues affecting law practice in Ireland. This training and continuous

professional development is facilitated through the Law Society of Ireland’s CPD

schemes, regional seminars and workshops for practitioners, law library catalogue

alerts and postal notification through societal distribution, e-library catalogues, and

case-law notification - more generally through law periodicals, monographs, and

subscriptions to case judgement data-bases.

Practice Owner and Principal Solicitor – Dorothy J. Walsh BA DipLaw

Dorothy J. Walsh (called to the Bar 2007) qualified as a solicitor with the Law Society

of Ireland, having completed her degree at University College Dublin. Starting out at

Arthur Cox as a Legal Assistant she quickly rose to Apprentice Solicitor and then

Solicitor at Thomas O’Reilly, and Garrett J. Fortune & Company respectively. She is

now the owner of Dorothy J. Walsh Solicitors & Associates in Drogheda Co.

Louth. She dove-tails her practice with her duties as the Drogheda Solicitors &

Association Secretary, is a regular contributing guest lecturer to the Law Society of

Ireland’s Diploma Programme and contributing author to the Law Society of

Ireland’s Gazette. She is a regular Seminar Speaker on Employment Law and Health

& Safety, and she is a present rotating member of the local Board of Drogheda

Homeless Aid. She is a profoundly active legal professional and advocate in the

locality, and is the primary legal contact for clients seeking legal advice at her offices,

regularly representing cases at district and circuit level. She is also the Louth

Network’s Business Woman of the Year 2010.

Legal Secretary

The legal secretary’s duties are foremost to handle all calls and visits to the solicitors’

offices in a knowledgeable, confidential, and professional manner. Moreover, their

job requires intense training in all aspects of law, legal problems, and inquiry. Legal

secretaries require high levels of recording, cataloguing, and communications

training to have the expertise to carry out their duties effectively, proficiently, and

without incident.

Outsourced Accountant & Financial Services

A B2B model for out-sourcing all financial accounting to an accountancy firm may be

in place for purposes of budget including: paying overheads, declaring income,

payroll management, and for submitting all relevant tax payments with audited debit

and ledger records.

1.3 Extra-Legal Activities, Chairing of Non-Profit Boards, & Volunteering

Dorothy J. Walsh BA DipLaw is a regular seminar speaker on employment law and

health & safety law. She is a rotating serving Board Member of the Drogheda

Homeless Aid. Dorothy openly welcomes invitations to facilitate, contribute to, and

sponsor local charities, fundraisers, and legal projects in need. She is a contributor to

the Law Society of Ireland’s diploma programme, and she is a regular contributor to the

Law Society of Ireland’s Gazette News Bulletin. She has contributed to a large volume

of copies, writing on many contemporary topics affecting law and society. Her

contributory profile is available using the Gazette library search on their home page.

2. LEARNER’S DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

The purpose of the learning placement was to apply the technical and theoretical

knowledge garnered from studying for the Certificate in Digital Marketing and New

Media Management to a real-life marketing context. I chose to apply a digital

marketing methodology to the context of law and legal practice. Dorothy J. Walsh

kindly supported this request, and we discussed the parameters of the duties and the

likely themes, frameworks, and time-lines. We agreed to apply an integrated digital

marketing program of work to enable her law practice to increase its online visibility

to generate business through e-Business services, and in technical terms to construct

a new website for the practice with an integrated of updated social media accounts

such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

In the interim I was offered a rolling agency position in executive

administration for trade marketing at Imperial Brands Plc Dublin, making it a

commuting impossibility to complete the project large-scale or by any means other

than distance-learning. So, we agreed to keep the aims simple, with at the very least

a new website as the central learning outcome. Linking the website to an already

existing social media platform network was to suffice.

2.1 Specific Case-Study – Dorothy J. Walsh Solicitors & Company Website

I embarked on the construction of the website with several task components in mind.

First, avenues of the do’s and don’ts as to how to market legal services were

researched in terms of business law considerations. Second, a clear picture of the

target market/audience was drawn up for segmentation/multi-audience resonance

based on the structure, background, and professional or community activities of the

law practice solicitors. Third, a website platform was chosen, that is, WordPress was

chosen to embed the content researched and constructed in an appropriate

contemporary template. Finally, the technical process of website structure and

content building had to be completed to a highly polished standard bringing

professional added value to the marketing effort already present at the practice.

2.2 Key Task Components

Some of the key technical tasks were to, for example, decide upon a brand-

marketing slogan. We decided that for the purposes of website header sections, and

future Google Adword use with embedded link, and visual for cross-posting between

integrated social media platforms, that the slogan ‘Dorothy J. Walsh Solicitors &

Company – Trusted, Professional, & Practical Solutions for all your Legal Service

Needs’ was apt. We needed to include a contact landing page where people could

send their query directly to e-mail with their contact details for reply. The website

had to be highly polished and simultaneously easy to navigate, so the structure of

the design had to be very clear, with neat tabbing for page navigation, and widgets

for the side-bar and footnotes for every page to remind the page visitor of some

basic facts such as: contact details and opening hours, professional accreditation and

membership, award-winning services and auto links to ‘about’ and ‘law portfolio of

services’ pages. The images chosen for headers had to be compelling, but calming,

professional, and holistic, in terms of the unique selling points relevant to the

professional identity of Dorothy J. Walsh Solicitors & Company’s theme of the

Trusted – Professional – Practical ethos. For example, a visual of the Law Society of

Ireland evokes impressions of ‘a professional nature’, a visual of a seminar room

evokes impressions of a ‘trustworthy/dedicated nature’, and a visual of a notebook

and computer on the desk without too much clutter evokes impressions of a

‘practical and personable nature’. The client testimonials page in turn reinforces

those three themes.

In the end a highly polished, technically functional, digitally integrated (with

LinkedIn and Twitter), navigation ready, and visually attractive website was the result.

The WordPress website ‘Dorothy J. Walsh Solicitors & Company: Trusted,

Professional, & Practical Solutions for all your Legal Service Needs’ can be found

here: https://dorothywalshsolicitors.wordpress.com/. A home-page screen-shot is

provided:

2.3 What Worked Well and What Challenges Had to be Overcome

Given that law as a profession is so cluttered with high-end nomenclature, pedantic

phrasing, and considered complex and more often than not overwhelming for

potential clients, it was quite challenging to construct succinct, clear, and welcoming

dialogue for this particular project. Almost every word had to convey a clear and

concise message to both attract and provide solace or anticipation of resolution with

the target client. Constructing the profession of law as a multi-faceted endeavor was

achieved by segmenting the activities of the principal solicitor into the categories of

case-work, continuous professional development (both attaining new certification

and contributing to the certified teaching of fellow colleagues), writing for law

magazines, carrying out voluntary work, and being present in local news and media.

Moreover, the permissions for images had to be WIKI or free image verified, if not

readily available to associated organizational members. The technical side to the site

was at times quite finicky but worth perfecting through multiple edit and review.

2.4 Personal and Professional Development

The legal requirements of confidentiality, and not to mis-market through mis-

representation, were at the forefront of my mind at every step of this placement

project, whether I was content writing through evidence-based content research, or

worried about the change in working arrangements undermining my obligation to

complete the task. By organizing a sufficient level of project work through distance-

learning I managed to overcome the logistical problems, and set about creating and

completing a high-end digital product to promote this law practice within the full

spirit of the original learning contract without compromising on quality. The moral

being not to be afraid to ‘bite off more than you can chew’ - just restructure the task

with the appropriate permissions to make it all possible.

3. LINKING THEORY TO PRACTICE

With constructing a website the first wow of applying theory to practice becomes

apparent when applying theoretical components of ‘Image Editing & Design Theory’

to the layout, structure, and design of the site. Adjacent design, emphatic text with

careful use of embolden and font-size and font-type, using white space to maximize

visual impact, chunking by content category, and using a minimum number of

colours per site colour-scheme, were all useful mantras to keep in mind. Moreover,

using good clear, heavy pixel, and quality visuals with elegant repetition of widget

footnote and side-bar text for emphasis rather than multi-purpose were important.

This focus facilitated an emphasis on trustworthiness for law practice relevant to

direct marketing communication to client purposes. SEO optimization was achieved

by ensuring exact domain name match to company name, with all image alt-text

saved under company name with matching explicit text signifiers in all content.

Moreover the model of inbound marketing focusing on the customer journey

through increased levels of processing through attracting, converting, closing with,

and delighting the client was drawn on (HubSpot, 2016). Specifically in using ‘buyer

personas’ the inbound methodology advocates building a storyboard to attract the

potential client, for example, through online images of professionalism,

trustworthiness, and practicality. Then in order to guide the potential recruit through

the ‘buyers journey’ from initial awareness, we use the website content or even a

future off-shoot Google Ad with a link to online video, and then guide them to the

decision stage where a serving solicitor greets them on a testimonial landing page.

As the image below shows the client is prompted through a consumer journey

storyboard of being attracted to the post or website, is then converted to believing

that this solicitor is for them, and closes by applying successfully for an appointment,

and being delighted with their legal outcome.

The Inbound Methodology – Tailoring Content and Context to Defined Market

Segments within a Target Audience Online (HubSpot Academy, 2016)

Essentially the marketing campaign needs to target strangers by digital means such

as calls to action, convert these strangers into visitors on their landing page and

increase online applications. This in turn feeds pipe-line client leads which will have a

conversion rate beyond the traditional calling in and telephoning appointment

making through third-party advertising. An online query landing page provides a

direct communication line with a potential client and a solicitor pre-appointment.

The introduction of this conversion model of strangers to the website visitors, and

then leads through filling out the online query landing page form, will lead to a new

stream of clients and increase revenue. It could provide a speedy filtering service to

ascertain whose cases are more likely to be evidence-based, procedural based,

financially viable etc. pre-consultation. The online query form also facilitates case-law

research in advance of meeting to best use client and solicitor time. Thus a digital

plan is an efficiency and time-saving plan. In a business where time means money –

ensuring the best use of legal thinking time is best.

Conclusion

This placement project commenced with the goal of designing a new website with an

integrated digital presence component for an established business. Together with

Dorothy J. Walsh Solicitors & Company, we did just that. A new high-end polished

website with well researched, up to date content and design, can now act as a

springboard to online advertising, landing page client conversion, and brand

marketing boosting the client-base of this ambitious and award-winning practice.

4. EVIDENCE OF EXPERIENCE – SCREEN SHOTS OF WEBSITE COMPONENTS

a. Landing Page Form

b. Persona Building and the Client Journey

c. Brand – Marketing: Trusted, Professional, & Practical

d. Public Engagement

5. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bakshi, H. (2016). How can we measure the modern digital economy? Significance,

Vol. 13 (3), June 2016.

ESOMAR: The World Association for Market, Social, and Opinion Research

https://www.esomar.org/

HubSpot | Inbound Marketing and Software Solutions

http://www.hubspot.com/

HubSpot Academy – Inbound Marketing Certification Program

http://www.hubspot.com/

Keenan, A. (2008). Irish Business Law (5th Ed.). Dublin: Gill & MacMillan.

Kotler, P. T. (2013). The Principles of Marketing. UK: Pearson Education.

LinkedIn Business Solutions – White Paper Series

https://business.linkedin.com/en-uk/marketing-solutions

McLoughlin, M. (2015). Selling Online: Have you updated your terms and conditions

for sale. Law & Online Selling Brief. McLoughlin & Co.

6. APPENDICES

a. Induction Checklist and Signed Code of Conduct

b. Hours – Record: Extension with Distance Learning Alternative for

Placement Options (working full-time beyond commuting distance)

c. Learning Contract; Extension with Distance Learning Alternative for

Placement Options (working full-time beyond commuting distance)

d. Verification Report – Use e-mail signature from Michelle B. Cowley here.

Dorothy Walsh is to provide an assessment by e-mail or phone upon

request.