When 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 charged with publicizing
the merger in both the business and legal press.
A big issue here was timing. 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,
Shafran 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 at a company that
respects the role of PR in driving business goals.
Specifically, Shafran's 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 win 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, with Shafran
at 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 the 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 since the law firm had concluded another major merger, and
the press liked that sense of continuity. "It became really a story
of momentum: Here's our fifth merger in the last seven years,"
Shafran says. "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 Associated Press.
Contacts: Hank Shafran, 617.951.8193, [email protected];
Claire Papanastasiou, 617.951.8881, [email protected]
Just Cause
In 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 account for
the time change.
The official news release then 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.