Law Firm Ambition is that rare thing: a collaboration between a large number of organisations and individuals, that works.
* Strength in numbers: five brands and over 100 legal sector experts collaborate on the Law Firm Ambition project.
* A new website resource to support law firms led to instantly successful webinars, which then spawned an annual conference.
* The inaugural conference in 2023 attracted over 150 delegates.
* This year’s conference, on ‘Embedding culture and taking people with you’, is on 25 June in London.
Law Firm Ambition started as a popular online resource, ‘making it easier to grow your law firm’. Whereas most modern publishing is based on churning out new content, Law Firm Ambition has carefully built up a set of ‘How to’ content that is updated every year.
Over 100 hand-picked experts from the legal sector have contributed to the content. Put simply, this is a project that people are keen to be associated with.
STRONG FOUNDATIONS
It certainly helped that first two Founding Partners were Travelers, the most established insurer in the legal sector, and Lloyds, the only bank with a specialist Lexcel-qualified legal sector team.
The other founders are Armstrong Watson and Hazlewoods, two accounting firms with thriving specialist legal sector teams, and Cashroom, the clear market leader in outsourced cashiering for law firms.
The Founding Partners not only fund Law Firm Ambition, they work together to plan and run its events.
WILDLY SUCCESSFUL WEBINARS
Only once the website was well established did Law Firm Ambition test out a webinar.
The team dipped their toe in the water with a webinar on pricing, with a panel that included Richard Burcher, the brains behind Virtual Pricing Director.
In a sector where it is perfectly normal to have a webinar audience of less than ten, almost 200 people from law firms registered for that first webinar. And the eight Law Firm Ambition webinars that followed on other topics were even more well-attended.
A CONFERENCE WHERE EVERY MINUTE COUNTS
It was the popularity of these webinars that led to the inaugural Law Firm Ambition conference in June 2023, which attracted over 150 delegates. Fast forward to 2024 and
at this early stage the second annual conference on 25 June already has over 130 delegates registered.
The conference theme is ‘Embedding culture and taking people with you’. Registration is via the website’s Events page.
Conferences, and indeed webinars and content generally, tend to include a lot of discussion about the problems that we face.
The whole focus of Law Firm Ambition is at the other end: the solution. The website content, the webinars, and now the conference, all focus on what to do to succeed as a law firm.
The conference has an impressive lineup of speakers, which in itself is nothing new. It is the content that the returning audience is looking forward to — hearing about what has worked and has not worked in other law firms, so they do not make the same mistakes.
Rory MccGwire is the Law Firm Ambition editor who recruits the experts and creates the content with them. He knows how precious time is for anyone working in the pressurised environment of a law firm, so every minute spent with Law Firm Ambition needs to be worthwhile.
“The test for good web content is whether it gets passed around,” he says. “The test for a good conference session, in my view, is whether the audience is taking notes or not. Nothing pleases me more than to see everyone madly scribbling away, so they can put all the tips into practice once they are back in the office.”
James Graham, managing director of professional indemnity at Travelers, adds: “We have assembled an incredible team for Law Firm Ambition and all of us are keen to demonstrate our sector expertise and give law firms masses of practical insights in the process.”
ONE STEP AT A TIME
So what is the secret to Law Firm Ambition’s success?
“This group intends to be working together for a long time,” says MccGwire. “So we have been able to progress carefully, one step at a time. We put huge effort into every bit of content that we produce. In a high-speed world that often seems to favour quantity over quality, there was a clear gap in the market for us to fill.”
Rory MccGwire
Email: rory.mccgwire@lawfirmambition.co.uk
Web: www.lawfirmambition.co.uk
01929 424646
07900 238772
