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How PR Boosted the Case of Two Law Firms That MergedBy PR News EditorsWhen the rapidly growing Boston law firm Bingham McCutchen merged with Southern California’s corporate/private equity boutique Riordan & McKinzie in 2003, Hank Shafran, director of communications at Bingham McCutchen, was appointed the task of publicizing the merger in both the business and legal press. Timing was a major issue. Shafran wanted to promise exclusives on both coasts, but also work with other publications that would pick up the story after the exclusives ran. What’s more, he needed to respond to the media’s needs under the constraints of a three-hour time difference. Fortunately, Shafran has a seat at the table of a company that respects the role of PR in driving business goals. Specifically, his input led directly to the advantageous scheduling of votes by the partners of the two merging firms. A major partnership vote determining the fate of two substantial law firms, scheduled to coincide with PR’s news-cycle needs? That’s no small trick, and Shafran says it could not have happened without the support of his manager. “I have a very close working relationship with the chairman of the firm [Jay Zimmerman], and in the course of discussing the rollout of this announcement, I suggested the scheduling of the partnership meeting,” he says. “He went along with that because he is a PR-savvy guy, and he understands the news cycle.” In the last nine years, Shafran has played various roles for the firm, and has worked patiently during that period to demonstrate the value of PR to the partnership. To achieve his present clout, he has literally gone one-on-one, sitting down with individual partners within the firm and bringing PR to bear on their major cases. In each meeting, he has come away with a new ally. “Partners in a law firm feel they are the boss, and they don’t like being told what to do,” he says. But that attitude has changed since Shafran took the helm of PR. “Jay never takes a media call directly,” he says. “It always goes through me, and then together Jay and I decide on the response strategy. Today, that goes for the [firm’s] partners, too.” It’s all about proving your value as a PR executive. “As long as you can demonstrate to the powers-that-be that it is to their benefit to have us at the table, that’s when they are going to be open to having us at that table,” says Claire Papanastasiou, Bingham McCutchen communications manager. In the case of the merger with Riordan & McKinzie, the PR team demonstrated value by driving the timing of the partnership vote and using that timing to win bi-coastal coverage, starting with exclusives in The Boston Globe and Los Angeles Times. There was an obvious angle here, since former Riordan & McKinzie partner Dick Riordan was also mayor of Los Angeles from 1993 to 2001, “but we just didn’t think that had any legs,” Shafran says. Instead, the PR team pushed the story as a straight business-strategy item. The July 2003 merger took place one year to the day after the law firm concluded another major merger, and the press liked that sense of continuity. “It became a story of momentum: Here’s our fifth merger in the last seven years,” says Shafran. “Then, we could go on to talk about the specific business strategies of this merger.” As the story expanded beyond the exclusives, it helped that Papanastasiou had extensive contacts in the legal press. As a former reporter and editor with legal journals, such as Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, she knew whom to call, and had a pretty good idea of the kind of story that would excite the trade press. Still, it took a certain finesse to get the right story out. After all, legal reporters could easily have construed this as a tale of a big fish swallowing a minnow. To get past that perception, “We really showcased the strengths of Riordan & McKinzie,” Papanastasiou says. “It is a premier firm that would have been welcomed by any other firm in the country. We were fortunate [the partners] decided to go with us, and we made that part of the story: That we were strong enough and successful enough that this gem of a firm decided to go with us.” With all these pieces in place, the campaign drew plenty of positive media coverage, including stories in The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and the New York Law Journal. American Lawyer Media’s various publications ran stories, as did the major California legal papers. The merger also received coverage on the business/news wires, such as Bloomberg and the Associated Press. Just CauseIn publicizing its merger with California law firm Riordan & McKinzie, Boston firm Bingham McCutchen faced a challenge: how to give exclusives on both coasts and then move on to the general news cycle within the smaller, but no less significant, legal press, particularly on the West Coast, all in spite of the bi-coastal time change?To meet the challenge, the PR team conducted interviews with selected press before the formal announcement. This allowed exclusives to run shortly after the merger was approved by the partnership. The deal was approved on a Monday, and the papers targeted for exclusives were given a heads-up on when the vote would come, so that they could write pieces for Wednesday’s edition. Notification was staggered by three hours to allow for the time change. The official news release went out on Tuesday, the day after the partnership vote. This in turn allowed other publications to begin work on the story in a timely manner.
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