Annual CEE Best Brand in Practice Award 2004
The PM Forum congratulates the winners of the fourth annual CEE Best Brand in Practice. The award ceremony this year was held in Warsaw on the evening of 3 November prior to the PM Forum's annual Regional Summit that also took place this year in Warsaw. We would also like to thank Legal Week which sponsored this year's awards.
Congratulations! It's a law firm.
The CEE practice of the law firm CMS Cameron McKenna was the winner of the 2004 CEE Best Brand in Practice award. This is the first time that a law firm has won this prestigious award: previous winners included property and accounting firms. Pictured to the right is Andrew Kozlowski, Managing Partner of the Warsaw office, as he accepts the award on behalf of the CEE practice from Mary Heaney, Associate Publisher of Legal Week which sponsored this year's awards.
Judges' comments:
CMS Cameron McKenna focuses on client relationships, teamwork, people management and personal development - arguing that the distinctive nature of the firm stems from its efforts to improve performance in these key areas. The firm measures client satisfaction regularly, providing several positive quotes from clients, no less than 81 of which worked with more than one CEE office last year. The firm has marketers in each of its CEE offices. In its Annual Review, the Head of Region commented: “Continuing on from the super human efforts of our marketing team, the Firm is planning to build on our existing business and marketing plan.â€
1st Runner up
The Prague office of Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker (C&W/H&B) won 1st Runner Up this year. Last year this property consulting firm won the 2003 CEE Best Brand in Practice award. Pictured to the right is Richard Petersen, Managing Partner of the Warsaw office, who is accepting the award on behalf of Prague from Mary Heaney of Legal Week.
Judges' comments:
The judges were impressed by last year’s winners Cushman & Wakefield Healey & Baker’s focus on whether it had truly lived its brand values in the past year. Being the largest firm brings benefits in any market, but the firm stresses that it is people and long term relationships that differentiate a firm from the competition. The firm sees its reputation as consisting of four elements (‘pillars of evidence’): innovation, coverage, best practice and partnership. Clear evidence was provided of progress on each of these pillars. The firm also provided the judges with glowing client references: “Their sector and geographical coverage is unparalleled†was a typical comment.
2nd Runner up
The Warsaw office of White & Case won 2nd Runner Up this year. Last year this law firm won Joint Runners Up. Pictured right is Witold Danilowicz, Managing Partner of the Warsaw office, who is accepting the award on behalf of his firm from Mary Heaney of Legal Week. The Prague office of the Czech law firm Havel & Holasek was also short-listed for an award.
Judges' comments:
White & Case has focused its marketing efforts on media, brochures and client events. The integrated nature of its approach results in its events receiving wide media coverage. The firm has a clear strategy of directing personal messages to specific journalists rather than issuing blanket press releases. As a result, they received $40,000 of publicity last year without the need to use paid publications. What was absent from the submission was an indication of how the firm’s management integrate marketing with client service, and the broader role of the brand in building what is clearly a world class law firm.
Download the advert that appeard in the global edition of Legal Week
Sponsored by Legal Week
We are pleased to announce that the award winning international publication Legal Week has sponsored the 2004 CEE Best Brand
in Practice awards.
You can check out Legal Week at:
www.legalweek.com.
International recognition for CMS CEE
In addition to receiving the awards pictured above, CMS Cameron McKenna in CEE was profiled in the Winter issue of professional marketing, which is the worldwide journal of marketing professional services published by the PM Forum in London.
This marks the first time that a professional service firm across the region was profiled in this journal. You can read the "practice profile" below from the Winter 2004 edition (reprinted here with permission from professional marketing) or download it in pdf format by clicking here.
No breather for the friendly firm
Two years can be a very long time in the world of marketing - as law firm CMS Cameron McKenna has shown. It has just won the PM Forum 'Best Brand in Practice' award across Central and Eastern Europe - from a marketing structure that was only put in place in 2002. Neasa MacErlean reports.
So how does a firm come to win a major award from the starting point of an almost clean sheet of paper two or three years ago? Duncan Weston, managing partner of CMS Cameron McKenna in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), boils it down to this: "We now have a dedicated marketing team with real client focus who live and breathe the firm's business."
That is certainly a major part of the story. The firm - the first legal practice to win this award from the Forum in the four years since it was set up - is structured as one firm across this region (with five offices, 38 partners and 170 other personnel) and it has invested heavily in building up a marketing department in the front line. While the firm's marketing HQ lies in London, there are also full-time marketing professionals in Budapest, Warsaw, Moscow and Prague. The Bucharest office is the only office outside the UK to be without its own professional marketer (at the moment). "We are one of the largest marketing teams in the region," says Judith Green, the London-based senior international business development manager who joined the firm in 2001 and then recruited the others.
She is particularly pleased that the marketers work so well together - given not only the thousands of miles that separate them but also the fact that everyone is so new to the role. "For the lawyers working with them, it is probably their first experience of working with marketing professionals," says the former Warner Cranston marketer. "The marketing professional performs the role of evangelist or crusader. Our team has worked really well in getting onto the right projects quickly. They haven't been treated like admin support."
She also attributes some of this success to the commitment of the firm's partners. That commitment has shown itself, however, in more than just a willingness to spend money: the partners have gone on training courses themselves and been prepared to adopt new ways of thinking about dealing with clients. For instance, Green says: "People can get used to thinking that a proposal looks a certain way. But, as marketing professionals, we are saying to partners: 'Does the client take a conservative approach or is the client fast, whizzy and entrepreneurial?' We are trying to mirror the client. So we need to ensure that we respond to different clients in quite different ways. On each of these proposals you have to produce something new." And, yes, the partners have accepted this in a short period of time. She has statistics which substantiate this claim - pointing to the 55 new pieces of work won through tenders, with the help of the marketers, in the first half of 2004.
Recruiting and retaining focused and committed personnel was highlighted as the main bridge to success when the firm set out its latest three-year strategy in 2002. Four 'building blocks' were identified - all of them to do with human beings and the relations between them: client relationships, teamwork, better management of people and personal development. This emphasis on human relationships and the quality of the working life is repeated by Green when she talks about her team. She highlights their weekly conference calls, the training they receive and their six-monthly conferences. When listening to Green and Weston, it is very clear that they both see a strong, direct link between good human relationships and the success of their team. She talks as much about the way they conduct their work ("we do a lot of talking to clients and we get a lot of useful information from them") as she does about the outcomes ("we are dramatically improving the quality of documentation in proposals and the approach taken and we are getting a lot of big client wins").
It would be wrong to suggest, however, that CMS Cameron McKenna is bound up in the human aspects of marketing to the exclusion of other issues. In fact, the three-year approach to setting strategies is very much about setting objective targets and putting a time and numbers discipline on the efforts of all people involved. Maintaining the momentum is obviously a major part of Green's role. Whilst 2004 - when the EU expanded to include Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland, where the firm has offices, and seven other countries - was a very busy one for CMS Cameron McKenna, 2005 will not be one in which to have a breather. A software system to support the firm's CRM programme is to be rolled out from the UK to the other offices from January. The electronic news service Law-Now is also to be given a makeover from the start of the year. And the annual business planning process will seek to tackle the major changes and opportunities being experienced in these growing markets - in the last year, for example, London lawyers trained up the East Europeans to deal with the sudden and substantial demand for advice on competition, state aid and public private partnership issues.
And then there is the normal day-to-day work of marketers - maintaining the databases, meeting the clients, training the partners, issuing the press releases and the other major tasks. Green clearly has a broad definition of what falls into business development. "If you talk to our clients about us, they will use words to describe us such as 'personable' and 'friendly'. We've identified some real brand strengths for the firm and part of my job is to ensure that the CEE practice delivers against our brand values." The other major ingredient in CMS Cameron McKenna's success has, of course, been the growth of the market in this part of the world. The firm decided to be extremely well placed to take advantage of the EU's expansion in May this year -and it is getting its rewards. Its profitability increased 10 per cent in its 2003/04 financial year - and its staff numbers have grown 10 per cent since May. This whole area can only become more powerful in the medium and long term. In the meantime, CMS is already well down the road with plans to strengthen its operations through developments in Slovakia and Bulgaria.
If it has achieved all this in little over two years, one can only wonder where the firm will be in another 24 months.
Download a reprint of this profile in pdf format by clicking here.
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