The Internet, digitization, and social media has impacted legal library teams immensely: larger volumes of data, increasingly complex copyright agreements and multiple types of available content being requested, consumed and delivered has contributed to the legal librarian’s already enormous task of researching and archiving.
But successful legal firms have a powerful ally: media monitoring. These firms manage media intelligence by leveraging companies like MediaMiser. This managed intelligence is not only used by the individual law departments and their lawyers, but also the firm’s marketing and communications team.
Allow us to explain.
1. Legal services: Using media monitoring as a research tool
Media content is one of the richest and most extensive sources for tracking court coverage, legislative announcements, and patent and copyright infringement. Media monitoring services can help:
- Source and distinguish relevant media content;
- Manage copyright materials and agreements;
- Curate and deliver media content through in-depth analysis reports and comprehensive daily, weekly or monthly media briefs that can be refined by law speciality and deployed to specific stakeholders at any given time.
Real-time alerts can be set up to harness millions of media items per day from both traditional (print, online, broadcast) and social media, which can in turn alert legal teams of important announcements, risk factors, and specific issues as they appear in media.
2. Marketing and communications: Knowing what’s being said
Media monitoring can help legal firms position themselves within their specialized fields. Through the use of targeted keywords, media intelligence platforms can reveal competitive intelligence, industry trends, and current issues, as well as identify influencers that can support the position of a brand—in this case, a legal firm and its practice.
Specifically, how is this done? We’re glad you asked:
- Share of voice analysis: Monitoring media mentions of competing law firms and attributing sentiment (positive, neutral, negative) to each media mention gives legal firms a 360-degree view of their position within the competitive landscape.
- Quote analysis:Tracking and verifying a lawyer or spokesperson’s media statements for accuracy and proper attribution can ensure the correct message is delivered by the right person (and if it’s incorrect, a press release or retraction can be issued). You should be able to source the journalist’s contact information through your vendor’s contact database in its monitoring platform, and your message can then be sent through its distribution module.
- Reputation management: Alerts of pending social or traditional media crises involving the firm or clients affiliated with the firm can help protect the firm and its lawyers from potentially harmful misinformation—and allows the comms team to act, not react.
- Earned vs owned media tracking: Many lawyers maintain useful blogs to help establish themselves as thought leaders in their specialized legal fields. Through experienced set up of media sources and selective keywords, a monitoring platform can filter owned media so firms can receive accurate reporting on earned media.
PS: media monitoring can also be used to curate content for blogs (see point #3 below).
3. The lawyer: Personal brand amplification
It’s important for most lawyers and law firms to actively promote their brands, and be seen as industry thought leaders. And social media, such as Twitter, is a great tool to amplify your brand.
But you need content that’s relevant. By monitoring the media and re-disseminating media content of interest to people engaged in social media, firms can be even more effective at branding themselves as industry leaders and influencers.
According to a 2012 article in The Globe and Mail, top Toronto lawyer Barry Sookman of McCarthy Tétrault LLP sources copyrighted news and shares it with his network of followers on a daily basis. Sookman has built a following through this curation of relevant content. In turn, people reference him because they perceive him to be credible—which helps both he and his firm continue to establish themselves as thought leaders.
