How to make the most of your LCN directory entry
Insights from LawCareers.Net’s Matthew Broadbent
Directory listings are one of the marketing bedrocks for law firms that recruit trainees and other early talent. LCN has conducted student surveys year after year that consistently show that online directories are the most used and highest-rated resource among candidates. This comes as no great surprise – the task candidates face when identifying and researching potential employers is, by nature, arduous and time consuming. A resource providing comparative information on the majority of your options (LCN lists more than 800 law firms offering graduate opportunities) can only be a great boon.
So, what does your entry need to do to catch the eye and interest of candidates? Having looked at thousands of directory entries over the years here are my tips to help you maximise your directory’s effectiveness.
One: who’s the audience and what do they (and don’t they) know?
Directories are universal resources accessed by a range of readers from the well-informed to the beginner. One should assume that the reader knows nothing about your firm, no matter how big or well-known your brand is. It’s easy as an insider to presuppose all sorts of knowledge, but imagine that the reader is being taken by the hand and guided into the often baffling world of law for the very first time. Diversity and inclusion is rightly being treated as important and this is where inclusion starts.
An entry that alienates some candidates isn’t fit for purpose.
Two: what’s the purpose of a directory entry?
To inform and inspire. On one hand, the entry must clearly and concisely lay out several core facts about your firm, including:
If a candidate doesn’t know anything about your firm, the directory entry should provide a ‘working knowledge' which allows candidates to categorise your firm and understand the key building blocks of researching the firm in greater depth should they so choose.
Alongside this, there should be a thread of content that advocates for the firm and provides reasons for candidates to believe it’s a place they’d like to launch their career. Ultimately, your directory entry’s goal should be for candidates to gain sufficient information to either mark the firm for more in-depth research or for them to cross it off their (not yet very) shortlist.
Three: key components
I think there are several core pieces of information that every entry should contain. This isn’t to say that we crave identikit entries and there’s plenty of leeway in how you put across information. However, I’d assert that all of the following should be present somewhere.
Categorisation
Include a clear statement about the type of firm. Candidates look for patterns and will develop a mental picture of how the legal market is organised. Give them some headlines – for example, “Firm X is a medium-sized commercial firm serving SMEs, individuals and some financial institutions. Its key strengths are its corporate, commercial property and private wealth departments. L500 described it as ‘doing work that a firm three times its size would be envious of.’”
The work
Departments and practice areas in law firms are quite hard to comprehend. As you know, names vary from firm to firm, departments overlap, expertise is grouped in novel ways. Try to demystify them as much as possible and give candidates a clear idea of what your firm is good at, where it concentrates its resources and how the different parts of the firm combine to make up the whole.
Statistics and citations are useful here – for example, the percentage that each part of your firm’s business generates and how many people are employed in each area give a factual picture, while awards (eg, plaudits from the client directories and other commentary) demonstrate credentials. I often hear firms say that “everyone knows us for this practice area but we want to attract people into these areas as well”. The directory entry is a great place for you to tell this to potential recruits.
Clients and deals
Law firms sell legal services so describing what legal services your firm sells and to whom is central to the directory. The more detail (notwithstanding client confidentiality) you can offer the richer the picture in a candidate’s mind. Who are your clients? What sectors are they from? What kind of problems does the firm help them solve?
I often see partner profiles on firms’ own websites detailing an individual’s recent deals and activities with a good degree of detail on the matters they worked on and what they contributed to clients. A few snapshots akin to this – maybe the firm’s key work of the past year – would help to bring your firm to life on the directory and help candidates think about it in a more sophisticated fashion.
The training
It goes without saying that if you’re selling the prospect of training at the firm there should be a good level of detail of what the training will entail. You can outline:
As ever making this information come alive and sound non-generic is a challenge, but the judicious use of examples will go a long way to achieving more genuine insight.
Qualification and beyond
Firms train people because they want them to qualify and become productive lawyers over many years. The trainee recruitment system has evolved in a binary way so that the key consideration becomes about whether candidates can get their foot on the first rung of the career, or not. But really, becoming a trainee is a point of departure not of arrival.
A vision of where a candidate might be in two, five or 10 years has to be essential to asking someone to pledge their future to you. Some information on which departments people qualify into is another good indicator of how your firm is set up and a few examples of different potential career trajectories open the possibilities to candidates. It’s another chance to make your firm stand out.
Other important bases to cover
How one approaches the following depends on what’s on offer but again is crucial.
The recruitment process
Important, functional and also an opportunity to promote inclusiveness and show why you want to recruit a range of people. Use examples and details to be open and transparent. Again, don’t be generic.
Extra information to specific groups
Are there any special initiatives arrangements for first years, non-law students, career changers, or underrepresented groups, for example? Make sure these are clearly signposted and those groups feel valued and wanted!
How to find out more
Your firm’s website will most likely be the next port of call for anyone still interested in the firm after reading your directory content (typically 20 to 30% of our readers go to a firm’s site or application form after reading the firm’s LCN directory page). So be sure to reference it, link to it, and talk about what more can be found there. If there are bits you really want them to look at, tell them!
How to meet you
Most good candidates will want to have some direct interaction with your firm once they become serious about applying. Use the directory entry (and in the case of LCN, our diary) to see how this can be arranged. Do you have info days, open days or specific times candidates can call for a chat? Do you attend law fairs, run seminars or skills days, work with societies, have ambassadors or offer access to lawyers to talk about what it’s really like? If this information is unclear, candidates might focus on a competitor where this information is set out.
Be careful with jargon and acronyms. You and I know what they mean but remember, the directory reader is likely to be relatively new to law, so check whether you’ve used any terminology that could be confusing and add in a brief explanation.
Stress-test your directory content
I’ve laid out some general suggestions of what should be included in your directory entry. In the case of your specific content, it’s worth running through a checklist as below:
Inevitably this piece will cover a lot you already know explicitly or instinctively but, to maximise the effectiveness of your directory page, it’s worth taking a systematic approach and applying some rigorous testing to the content. Ultimately the question is: can I say that this entry will effectively inform and attract candidates to the firm?