Brandfolder enables seamless collaboration for lawyers & clients at global law firm

Challenge

All law firms operate on the same central tenets of success. Accuracy. Meticulousness. Speed. From daily pitches for clientele to the production of thought leadership content, fact sheets about lawyers, and industry analyses, firms across the globe are churning out copious legal and knowledge-based documents to maintain competitive edge, market share, and successful service of their many clients.

When our client's UX/UI designer (we'll call him John) joined his law firm's marketing group three years ago, he instantly identified a critical problem with the scalability of their asset organization. "When I joined, there was no digital asset management at all. It was a hard drive," he recalls. "I basically had a mini-heart attack in the corner, because I thought, 'This is just not sustainable.'"

In addition to the chaotic organization norm, John's marketing group was tasked with supporting two major groups of stakeholders: lawyers and clients. John knew that the sheer volume of daily content production was inordinate, and the speed and accuracy with which they were expected to produce essential documents necessitated a massive rethinking of standard processes.

"There was an unnecessary amount of stress on the designers because they just couldn't find what they needed, and as a result I saw people reproducing content all the time. I saw bizarre variations of things hidden on the hard drive, and on people's desktops. But we are a law firm, and we're all about accuracy, so the marketing group should reflect that principle, too."

Solution

John immediately sought out a digital asset management system to thwart further internal frustrations and the threat of brand inconsistency as the firm grew. In searching for a DAM, John knew the biggest obstacle would be executive buy-in. Law firms, he explained, are often more conservative in their willingness to adopt new systems of operation.

"Unless you say other law firms are using this, it's often met with a lot of skepticism. People tend to believe that the service you use needs to have a specialized understanding of the industry you operate in. In this case, though, digital asset management has nothing to do with law firms—it simply has to do with having digital assets, and needing to manage them."

Brandfolder, ultimately, became their DAM of choice because of its best-in-breed technology and robust feature suite. It gave John's firm the flexibility to adopt a new process in a way that allowed all departments the freedom to maintain business as usual.

Major Brandfolder game changers:

• Brandfolder's open API and many API integrations and plugins allowed the marketing group to connect their new single source of truth with other key software, like Pitch Perfect and Microsoft Office
• Executives were thrilled to cancel an old video platform subscription by implementing Brandfolder. The team now houses and modifies all marketing videos on new laws and compliance regulations within the Brandfolder platform, seamlessly sharing with lawyers and uploading to their website

"Brandfolder is the only platform that deals with video in any sort of reasonable way," says John, "and it's only one feature."

• The firm uses Brandfolder Sections and stacked assets so stakeholders can find materials quickly
• Brandfolder CDN allows the marketing group to update and distribute key stakeholder documents, ever-changing lawyer information (like headshots and awards), and brand logos centrally, ensuring brand consistency as updated assets propagate wherever they're published

Results

After implementing Brandfolder, this law firm has realized incredible benefits in team efficiency, accuracy, and distribution ease. This year, John oversaw a major rebrand. With that came the cumbersome task of launching a fresh website with an entirely new UI and branded experience.

The rebrand was powered exclusively by Brandfolder CDN. All new digital assets were hosted in Brandfolder, with asset availability dates set. When the team was ready to launch their refreshed identity, embedded CDN links enabled assets to immediately update across the firm's website pages with consistency—and at scale. "I didn't even need to communicate with the developers," remembers John. And the time given back to the marketing group as a result of the streamlined CDN process and centralized digital asset hub was quite considerable.

Brandfolder saved us 20% in time spent on the creative process. It's very significant.

The marketing group now works entirely out of Brandfolder, and is able to quickly and effectively collaborate with lawyers and the firm's business development group in an unprecedented manner. A professional photographer comes into the office every three weeks to take new pictures of lawyers, for example. And while the process of updating all relevant materials—on the website, in fact sheets, in their database, etc.—used to require extensive back and forth, the team now employs Brandfolder's simple interface and CDN to eliminate that tedious work each time new assets come in.

"Solving that simple problem alone," says John, "shaves two days off of a person's workload."

Having that time back gives John's colleagues the freedom and autonomy to produce more valuable content. "People have already forgotten how hard it used to be to find a particular thing. You can do things quickly, and they're done accurately. We're now using our assets in a more dynamic way."

Looking back, John is happy that his firm was able to diverge from industry norms and land on a digital asset management platform with universal best-in-className qualities. "I didn't come from a legal background or another law firm, and I've dealt with quite a variation in clients," he explains. "What do you always end up doing? You just find the best product. I think it would have been a big mistake if we had gone for a DAM that was allied to law firms, because there would have been things that we needed that those particular products wouldn't have thought were important. I think people should be aligned with products that are actually as universal as possible, and not niche."

His counsel to other legal firms looking for better digital asset management? "You have to examine a product on its merits, and not because a salesperson told you that 4 out of 5 law firms use it, because that doesn't mean that it's good or scalable. Don't go for the specialist in your industry, just go for the specialist."

Interested in learning how Brandfolder can help you manage, distribute and analyze your brand assets?