LAW FIRM: Haynes and Boone
CATEGORY: Overall Excellence in Media Coverage
PR AGENCY: Manning Selvage & Lee
BUDGET: $17,000
WEB SITE: http://www.haynesboone.com
Oh, joy. Another law firm opens shop in New York City. Is this media-worthy? Hardly, yet in the spring of 2004, the Dallas-based law firm Haynes and Boone LLP managed to win coverage in the weeklies and in the business trades in conjunction with
its new presence in Gotham.
Together, PR firm Manning Selvage & Lee and the law firm's in-house PR executives were able to generate press coverage thanks to an inherent understanding of the market.
"MS&L knows the New York market so well; they know the business community, they know which publications are important and which issues are important to the market there," says Michael Patterson, Haynes and Boone spokesman.
At the same time, the PR execs employed a smart media strategy. Rather than pitch it as a story about a law firm's expansion, they framed it as a story about legal trends, and positioned Haynes and Boone attorneys as experts in evolving areas of litigation.
The challenges were manifold. For starters, it was a relatively young firm (founded in 1970); it had a pretty low profile on the East Coast, and, perhaps most challenging, was moving into one of the most crowded legal markets on earth.
News releases scored brief coverage in the New York Law Journal, New York Lawyer, The Daily Deal and elsewhere.
That might have been the end of it, except that the PR executives at MS&L had an ace in the hole: A long-standing relationship with Tommy Fernandez, a reporter at the weekly Crain's New York Business Law.
A series of meetings was subsequently arranged between Fernandez and Kenneth Bezozo, the law firm's managing partner.
The two met for a backgrounder lunch, followed by an exchange of e-mails. In June 2004, the reporter received editorial approval to move ahead with a feature story based not on the firm's arrival in New York City but, rather, on its expertise in certain legal areas,
such as finance and securities litigation.
In a second meeting, the reporter and his editor received on- and off-the-record materials that included court documents and third-party sources.
The result? A front-page story titled "Tax Shelter Crackdown Hits Law Firms; Illegal Schemes Attract Suits, IRS." Bezozo and his firm are cited three times in the article.
It all ran just as planned, according to Mark Harrop, senior vice president and director of editorial services in the global corporate financial practice at MS&L.
"We encouraged them to get out there with a new take on national issues -- issues that went beyond New York City -- that would give them a platform where we could have a reasonable expectation of getting a page-one story," he says.
For a $17,000 PR investment, the law firm scored repeated high-profile mentions in top media outlets such as Crain's New York Business and the New York Law Journal.
The media coverage, in turn, led directly to inquiries about its corporate tax and business-transaction capabilities along with invitations to address such professional gatherings as The New York Society of Securities Analysts.