Stack Ranking: RubyLaw Webinar Recording

Thank you for your interest in Stack Ranking, RubyLaw's exclusive review of the 2022 Legal Marketing Tech Stack!

• What other tools are you seeing when it comes to data cleanup?
• Are there any out-of-category newcomers that we should be looking at?
• How is Marketing Automation being defined?
• Does the data provide any insight into whether lawyers are using specific software systems/tools?

After watching this program, be sure to check out our report, The Legal Marketing Technology Study '22, as well as our follow-on webinar, Stack Ranking, Part 2, featuring Roy Sexton, Drew Hawkins, and Gordon Braun-Woodbury.

Transcription

Alexander Kotler (00:18): Good afternoon or good day wherever you are and welcome to Stack Ranking, a webinar during which we'll review and discuss the 2022 RubyLaw Legal Marketing Tech Stack. If that is the program that you are seeking, you are in the right place. I'm Alex, the sometimes scruffy fellow to the right. I lead marketing business development, as well as research initiatives like this one over at RubyLaw.

Jaron Rubenstein (00:51): And I'm Jaron Rubenstein, founder and president of RubyLaw, a content lifecycle management or CLM platform that helps legal marketers to manage, edit, publish, and refine digital content for the web and across other digital marketing channels. RubyLaw supports firms that include the small selection showcased on the screen, as well as many more within the Am Law 200, NLJ 500, and unranked growth minded firms via RubyLaw Express Offering. We're thrilled to have you joining us for this important and hopefully illuminating session. Before we dive into our program, we want to take a moment to acknowledge the Legal Marketing Association for partnering with us on this year's initiative.

The LMA is the authority for legal marketing worldwide, and we're grateful for the organization for championing this research, as we believe it not only supports the LMA's mission, but can help to advance the sector and careers of participating members and firms. The LMA has elevated the visibility of our research this year, inviting members to participate directly, in turn allowing us to deliver more value to legal marketing community and to our clients as well.

Alexander Kotler (02:08): In addition to thanking the LMA, we want to thank the team over at Calibrate, Gordon Braun-Woodbury in particular, for continuing to support and assist in the analysis of this important research. Calibrate is a consultancy focused on helping legal services organizations achieve their operational excellence. During the next and final chapter of this webinar series, which is happening in late September, so mark your calendars and we'll share some information again later, we hope to have members of the Calibrate team, as well as practicing legal marketers to join us to discuss our extended findings from the 2022 Legal Marketing Tech Study. Here is what we have planned for our very exciting show today.

We are going to shed some light on the overall initiative. We'll on the survey, which is the primary source for the data informing the visualization you see to the right. We'll then introduce the blueprint. Hello, blueprint. You'll see that section when it comes along, and we'll break down the findings during the aptly named section breakdown. I won't do the dance though, I promise. If you have questions throughout, please feel free to drop them into chat and we'll address them as we can. You can also hold onto them and we'll respond to them during the questions and coming attractions section at the end of our performance today. Every good show needs a theme music. To start, let's provide a little background on our study.

We released the first iteration of the Legal Marketing Tech Stack back in 2019. Back in 2018, we heard Scott Brinker, AKA Chief MarTech and a HubSpot executive, speak at LMA Tech West. Scott's work has been critical to the evolution of marketing technology, namely in observing the explosion of software products in use and coming to market annually. His marketing technology landscape, which is pictured here on the screen, highlights the thousands of tools in play organized by category. You can see some of the categories in red, in orange, in blue. Those will come up again later. There are so many that it's best to use this visual to appreciate the challenge that software buyers have and that software makers have in standing out from others in the field.

Where we saw a gap though was in applying his categories to the legal services market, where there's a vibrant community of practitioners, where there's a legacy of resource constraints, where there's a reputation for late adoption, where certain products are seemingly entrenched within the sector, and where inertia seems to inhibit forward momentum. We've also learned from engaging with our 40 plus clients that there's little time for education on what exciting new developments are coming to market, nor is there much time or visibility into what their colleagues or their peers are using at competitor firms.

One terrific resource that I do want to cite is the LMA's marketing technology special interest group, where we frequently see a member ask, "What are you using for X function?" This is a great one-off, but it doesn't necessarily contextualize by firm's size or revenue, meaning that well-intended responses may not be the right fit for the asker. Thus, we decided to launch version one of the blueprint in 2019, which was mostly anecdotal, cobbled together with help from marketing technologists that we knew. Four years on, we've developed and continued to hone the systems, segment, and importantly, refine the process by which we're getting this information.

This year, in partnership with the LMA, we have trebled the number of responses, giving us full confidence to say that this year's is more representative than ever. It's also worth mentioning that we reached out to Scott Brinker to tell him what we've been up to since his keynote, and it was quite validating for us to get this response from him. There won't be more self-congratulations for us. That's the background and let's start by taking a look at the survey. Our survey was disseminated via multiple channels, reaching a broad base of legal marketers predominantly by email and social media distributed by the RubyLaw team and the LMA. The survey consisted of 33 multiple choice questions, most containing an other option for additional direct input by the respondents.

For instance, if someone didn't see the answer they were looking for, they could say X, Y, or Z in the other field. It's worth noting that the basis of the blueprint consists of the responses to the first 22 questions, which are the ones referencing the tools. Each tool or system has been defined and ladders up to one of the six marketing technology categories. You recall, I mentioned those colors in the landscape, you'll see them again, but they consist of advertising and promotion, sales content and experience, social and relationships, data and management. Today, we're going to focus on the first 22 systems. We'll draw some high level comparisons and contrast, or contrast rather, with the 2021 study, particularly where we think appropriate and intriguing.

I think there's a lot of intrigue when we compared this year with last year. I wouldn't be a marketer though if I failed to mention that today is only part one of a two part marketing technology extravaganza. We're working on a research paper, the insights from which will be revealed, and then discussed along with special guests. It won't just be me and Jaron. It'll be other very special people on September the 30th. Consider this session the prelude to the bigger session with the major reveals coming after Labor Day. Stick around until the end I encourage you because we're going to share the link so that you can sign up and mark your calendar now.

And last bit of promotion before we really get started, if you haven't grabbed a copy of the blueprint, you can get one via the link on screen. You won't need it for our walkthrough today. It's just good to come in handy. We're going to go through. You'll be able to read everything, I promise. I just want to ask, Michele, you've already preempted me. Thank you very much for dropping it into chat. We're going to drop a couple other links as we go through in there. Just useful for you to check out chat and you'll be able to get what you need and why it might be helpful afterward. With that, more than 160 firms are represented in our study.

As we take a look at who were our participants, they've been segmented by revenue, number of lawyers, and two ranking schemes, the Am Law and the NLJ. You can see that the largest segment is represented by firms under 100 million in revenue. By quantity of lawyers, it's about a 50/50 split between those with fewer than 150 and those with more, namely up to the hundred, pardon me, the thousand lawyer threshold. In terms of Am Law rankings, about 40% are within the Am Law 200 and closer to 60% are within the NLJ 500. Here's the fun part. It starts to get more interesting though when we compare this year's field with last year's, and we see a significant jump in the number of smaller firms participating.

This is evidenced by the greater proportion of sub $100 million revenue firms, the doubling of the one to 50 lawyer segment, and the 20% decrease in Am Law ranked firm participants. Just let that soak in for a quick moment before I move on. Hello, blueprint. So now that we have a better idea of who participated in this study, let's walk through the legal marketing technology ecosystem. The six categories that I mentioned are shown on top in these green boxes. If you can't read them, don't worry, you'll be able to see one as we go through. Just want you to be able to navigate through the blueprint itself. The type of information, whether data or content, is referenced in the information bar, these yellow boxes, which is the source of our definitions in the survey.

I'll remind you of those as we go through as well. And then finally, the corresponding systems sit in the rows below. These are here in blue. Now, we're going to dive into each of the categories. First up, advertising and promotion, which consists the following systems: content syndication software, which helps your content to reach a larger audience through distribution, republication, and other means, public relations software, which helps you reach and engage target audiences, and search and social advertising software, which helps you create, deploy, and manage advertising campaigns on social media networks. Here are some of our responses and observations and this is the format for the next sections, so standby.

With content and syndication, we see that JD Supra is far and above the dominant player, particularly among firms over $100 million in revenue. This demonstrates the importance of content strategy and SEO to law firm marketing, namely finding ways to amplify and increase a firm's content footprint. Within public relations, it's much less clear. Cision, Meltwater, and Newswire are the most prevalent with none being especially dominant and no clear distinction across revenue bands. This suggests that PR technology is less utilized in legal perhaps than in other sectors, or that firms handle PR via an agency or with self-managed contacts.

Within search and social, we see that LinkedIn is used by 25 to 50% of firms across revenue bands, with the largest firms, those being $500 million, and up using Google Ads twice as much as midsize and smaller firms. Perhaps no surprise, it could be down to budget. There you have it. Let's move on to sales, which consists of business development software, which helps you manage and track activities within your business development pipeline, and proposal and document generation software, which helps you create, manage, and modify proposals, pitches, and other documents. Within business development, we see interaction as the most used for structured business development, with structured referring to pipeline management.

This is the case across all revenue bands, particularly among the largest firms though, where nearly 50% of respondents reported using it. In the 100 to $500 million segment, Intapp is as prevalent as interaction, while ContactEase is more popular than Intapp, but less prevalent than interaction among smaller firms. And then the most visible takeaway about proposal generation software is that proposal automation and generation is not widely adopted by small firms, those being zero to $100 million in revenue. In this category, no solution is used by more than 3% of firms.

Among midsize firms, RubyLaw and Foundation are the most prevalent, with Foundation being the most widely used among firms $500 million and up. Jaron, I've forced you to be quiet for the duration of our time together so far. What have you to say about this?

Jaron Rubenstein (14:47):

Looking back at our study last year, we're still seeing considerable under investment in proposal generation and automation systems, particularly among firms under or up to $500 million in revenue. While it does look like investment year over year has declined, this could simply be optics as this year's study enjoyed greater participation from respondents from smaller and unranked firms. We saw that a few slides ago how many more firms we saw at the smaller scale. But here I'd like to mention some ancillary, but still quite compelling research about the power of leveraging platforms. If you tuned in last year to our webinar Platforms not Platitudes, this will be familiar.

By switching to platforms, RubyLaw being one, firms can create greater synergies while driving more efficiency across teams and processes. Gains from adopting platforms can save firms upwards of six figures, $100,000 a year, depending on size and volume of activities. But the elimination of context switching and other friction laden processes are evident in the adoption of platforms. That's the key there. These savings apply to RubyLaw in particular, but the benefits of platforms are not unique to our software offering. You can grab a copy of that research paper via the link on screen.

Michele will drop that link into the chat as well. If you'd like to grab that. It's compelling research on where those efficiencies come from and how your firm can actually save budget at the end of the day for your marketing and business development teams.

Alexander Kotler (16:28): Next is content and experience, and you'll see I'll bring Jaron in for lots of the big level thinking and I'm just the reporter here, but bear with me. Here's where we're going to find content management systems software, which helps non-technical users manage, edit, and publish digital content, email marketing software, which helps you create, manage, and deploy email marketing campaigns, marketing automation software, which helps you substitute manual processes with automated activities to achieve personalized marketing at scale, accessibility compliance and optimization software, which helps you minimize errors while ensuring greater access to your content all while delivering the best experience possible.

There's two more. Search engine optimization or SEO software, which helps you manage and monitor your content's performance on search engines, and digital client engagement software, which helps you engage with clients in non-traditional and sometimes automated ways, including bots and notifications. Here are some of our responses and observations. Content management system is one that is close to our hearts at RubyLaw. It's the content life cycle management platform that we offer. It includes RubyLaw content, a CMS, and one of its core modules. Here, we see the large law firm category dominated by RubyLaw and Sitecore, with midsized firms preferring RubyLaw followed by WordPress.

Smaller law firms, which are well represented in this year's law firm, I'm sorry, in this year's study, prefer WordPress to other solutions. One of the more interesting observations though that we have this year relates to email marketing. While many law firms tend to flock toward particular legal sector specific solutions, we see that smaller firms, that's the zero to $100 million category, use tools prevalent in other sectors, for instance, Constant Contact, MailChimp. Meanwhile, firms in the $100 million and up segments appear to prefer Vuture. Marketing automation is probably more of a mindset and process than a specific tool, although specific tools are used to perform automation.

What's revealing here is how firms think about automation and for what. What we see is that the largest firms prefer Vuture, while midsize firms show reliance on HubSpot for marketing automation activities as an alternative to Vuture. It's here too that we see the "platform concept" that Jaron just referenced. There's a number of ways that HubSpot users deploy the tool, CRM, sales, engagement, email marketing, and more, yet it's the ability to create specific automated workflows that are dependent on specific activities and triggers, clicks, downloads, list membership that describe its application to marketing automation.

We've not seen HubSpot effectively break into the enterprise tier, that being the $500 million revenue and up segment, but we are seeing it make consider will gains among smaller firms supporting the platform concept. This mentioned that automation appears to be less critical to smaller firms is both a surprise since marketing automation combats resource challenges, and not a surprise because investment in marketing automation is required to offset manual resource requirements. A little bit of a chicken and egg or a catch 22 situation at play. For accessibility, compliance, and optimization, firms above the $100 million threshold show a preference for site improve with adoption at 50% or greater in each segment.

Below the $100 million threshold though, no single tool is dominant, with Siteimprove still the most used. We've got two more in this section. Hearkening back to what we mentioned earlier about the importance of content and SEO in the search and social category, we see that Google Search Console is used by 25% of small firms, 30% of midsized firms, and 37% of large firms. Finally, when it comes to digital client engagement, bots and desktop notifications are still not highly visible tools and surprisingly, even less so at the largest firms. This is surprising because they could probably most benefit from and capitalize on these types of automated service tools given the breadth of their offering and the size of their audiences.

There's just so much more to service. If you have something automatically responding in a personalized way, it's much more effective, efficient, and you're able to convert those leads or interactions into whatever your desired goal is. But before I give away all the secrets, let's bring Jaron back for a deeper dive and some reflection on the year over year results.

Jaron Rubenstein (21:45): One of our observations appears to be greater representation of WordPress among the sub $100 million segment. Compared to last year where 32% of respondents reported using WordPress, this year we're seeing 42% reporting the same. We believe this statistic comes down to a couple of factors. The first is that increased representation in that sub $100 million segment this year and this year's survey. With more people participating, we're bound to see movement. Firms within that smaller segment with less than 50 lawyers, a system like WordPress might be a good solution for them. That just accounts for a marginal shift. What we really think is happening though, is probably a poorly worded question in the survey.

Given the focus of RubyLaw on content life cycle management, our bread and butter, of course, is helping firms manage their content, power their websites. We know that many firms, including some of our clients, use WordPress backed technology to support their blogs, which is understandable since WordPress is, first and foremost, a blogging platform. We believe that some respondents probably selected WordPress because it's a familiar name and what they know they're using for blogs, but they may not have known what they're using for their main websites or other digital properties.

And that may have affected the survey results. But as mentioned earlier, we are developing a research paper, digging a lot deeper into these insights. With that, we hope to have further evidence to support or deny this claim.

Alexander Kotler (23:13): Another interesting observation, which we touched on earlier, is the rare usage of marketing automation by smaller firms. Jaron, maybe you want to take us through this a little bit deeper.

Jaron Rubenstein (23:27): Below the $500 million revenue band, upwards of 40% of firms are not using marketing automation, with 70% of the smaller firms not using it. Automation refers to these processes that eliminate manual tasks, whether it's auto-registration or auto-responses, including things like out of office emails, but specifically automatic emails triggered by actions, additions to list, downloading gated content, things like that. Those are really those opportunities where a firm can just amplify what their marketing teams are capable of. We would like to see more of that coming in the future, for sure.

Alexander Kotler (24:11): Bringing back our friend, Scott Brinker, two thumbs up, Scott sent out an email on Tuesday of this week touching on this specific topic. The chart on screen, and I know the words are small, so I'm going to illuminate them with my words, it shows a breakdown of who builds business automations, which is a higher order than simply marketing automations, which is what we're talking about. This chart shows that 53% of automations are built by IT, and that's the green side to the left, with the business teams only building 47%, to the right, that's the salmon side. Business operations units of which marketing is one are responsible for only 23%. This could be a possible explanation, for instance, that marketing as a fraction of a larger unit is only driving a limited amount of business automation processes. Obviously this graphic isn't focused on the legal sector, so it's mostly food for thought.

The takeaway is simply that automation can be an accelerator. Social and relationships. This consists of five different subcategories: alumni portal software, which helps firms maintain connections with former employees and associates, customer relationship management or CRM software, which helps firms manage and monitor relationships with key stakeholders, both internal and external, enterprise relationship management or ERM software, which helps firms identify key relationships and enhance related intelligence, events and webinar software, which helps you conduct virtual meetings, webinars, and life altering experiences like this one, social media publishing software, which helps you manage and publish content across one or more social media networking platforms.

Here are some of our observations. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we see all firms basically relying heavily on LinkedIn for their alumni networks. Among the largest firms, $500 million and up, Vuture and IntraWorlds are also visible. For this, it's assumed that Vuture is being used to manage alumni lists and email communications, with IntraWorlds, a more dedicated firm controlled alumni experience. Smaller firms likely don't have budget resources, alumni size, or even the business development or recruiting use cases to justify the investment in a dedicated environment. In terms of CRM, interaction is the preferred CRM for legal sector. Among smaller firms, ContactEase is almost as prevalent as interaction. Used by about 20% of firms.

This could be based on use case, budget, contracts, or a host of factors. As for ERM, interaction is used by 57% of the largest firms. Smaller firms though also rely on Intapp, especially in the $100 to $500 million segment. Zoom, if you've never heard of it, is the dominant tool for events and webinars, while we see a range of tools being used for social media publishing. These include Hootsuite, which is preferred by smaller firms in the zero to $100 million dollar category, with JD Supra's social publishing features also registering. Within the midsize, the $100 to $500 million revenue band, tools are distributed, while the largest firms are using Clearview Social more than the rest. Here's an image of outer space from the James Webb Space Telescope.

I think we just need to break things up a little bit as much as I love the marketing tech stack blueprint. God, that's gorgeous. Whew! Okay, back into it. Data category. Competitive intelligence software, which provides access to deeper richer market intelligence than is available via publicly accessible sources. Analytics and dashboard software, which helps you to visualize data performance from campaigns and other sources. Sometimes I say data. Sometimes I say data. I don't really know why. Experience management systems or EMS software, which helps firms manage matters and firm experience. Data or data enrichment software, which helps firms view contact and company records more holistically, particularly when the available information is incomplete.

Within competitive intelligence, here are some of the things that we observed. Wide distribution across tools and segments, with Monitor Suite being the most consistently used ranging from 12 to 22% in the various segments. What's unique here is that most firms are relying on multiple tools for competitive intelligence, suggesting that this is an important category and one where budget seems to be available. Within analytics and dashboards, the answer, Google Analytics, but also Google Data Studio for visualizations and reporting, but Google Analytics.

When it comes to experience management systems, and this is an area that tends to be housed typically within the knowledge management departments of law firms, similar to what we have seen with tools like proposal generation software within the sales category, we see limited adoption by smaller firms, that's the zero to $100 million category. Among firms with revenue of $100 million and up, we're seeing use of RubyLaw Experience, Intapp, and Foundation, with many firms using RubyLaw Experience in conjunction with Intapp or Foundation to display experience content on their websites in real time.

Obviously we have a little bit of inside information on that track. Finally, for firms enriching data, and these are mostly the $100 million and up segment, LinkedIn is the preferred tool. Jaron, come back to us from outer space for another nugget of knowledge, please.

Jaron Rubenstein (30:22): Hi, Alex. Good to be back. Looking at a year over year change, we see the power of platforms at play again. Non-usage of experience management software among firms below $500 million in revenue is noticeable. Solutions like RubyLaw, which have experienced modules, can seamlessly integrate experience management to enable ongoing matter management from a marketing perspective with real time website display and database searchability for the marketing team. On the front end, it gives you website visitors, many of which are buyers of legal services of your services, the ability to see your lawyers' latest and greatest wins, the most relevant matters to their expertise.

Having those not just greatest wins, but the most relevant matters build that necessary credibility to drive engagement and ultimately inbound inquiries, which is what we all want out of these efforts is, of course, to build business for the firm and for our lawyers. The other side of this is integrating things like time and billing software in your matters, and that's just a sneak peek at one of the findings to be revealed in our next session.

Alexander Kotler (31:37): Finally, the management category, which includes talent management software, which helps you manage the employment candidate pipeline from application through to offer and reporting. Collaboration software, which helps you communicate and work together with colleagues, both internally and externally. Within talent management, firms across all categories appear to be using LinkedIn and viRecruit. The largest firms though also rely on Workday, with distribution relatively evenly distributed among these tools, LinkedIn, viRecruit, and Workday by the largest firms. And then when it comes to collaboration software, all firms use tools like Zoom and Microsoft Teams regardless of size.

What we see though is with the larger firms, they also rely on WebEx, while Cisco Jabber is a bit more prevalent among midsize or $100 to $500 million firms. Interestingly, mostly to me, maybe not to anyone, tools like Slack are barely registering in legal. I do want to point out a few things before we open everything up for questions, namely I want to say there's a terrific chat going on in the chat. Thank you to those of you who are contributing there. I think that's a wonderful thing. Some really great things I think we can dig into during our Q and A session, if anyone wants to bring it out into the open discussion. But I do want to plug our follow on session taking place on Friday, September 30th.

It's always our goal to make these short, sweet, and high impact. We are coming closer to the end of our program. But during that session, we're going to invite special guests to provide their opinions and assertions, so you don't have to take our word for it. We're going to go deeper into the findings than we did today. Because remember, there's also the questions after 22, where we asked about certain preferences and other geo, demo, and psychographic information. That's going to come together in some hopefully very interesting and dynamic ways. We'll be sharing more details about our guests in the weeks to come, but you can sign up today if you'd like to reserve your spot.

That's right, part two, and there'll be actual people, not emojis, participating in that session. We do hope you'll join for that when that comes around. I am going to now with joy bring things into the Q and A session. I would love to answer some questions and ask some questions, but I also do want to point out, and I'll ask Michele. Thank you, Michele. You're always ahead of time. If you want to sign up, you can reserve your spot. We'll be promoting it like crazy between now and then, but it is open if you want to make sure that it gets on your calendar. With that, really, really delighted and grateful that all of you could join us for this session, and I'll be quiet so we can answer some questions.

Feel free to come off of mute. Throw them into chat. I, again, just want to express my gratitude for your spending 37 or more minutes with us today. We'll see you soon, September 30th.