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The uphill battle to humanize lawyers
Agency59 chief creative officer Brian Howlett has the unenviable – some might say Herculean – task of humanizing lawyers.
Tired of being the butt of bad jokes and held in public disdain, the Ontario Bar Association has retained Agency59 to makeover the image of its 18,000 members.
“It’s a slow process. You don’t change the image of a profession overnight,” says Howlett, adding it requires an “attitude shift.”
Lawyers are the latest professionals who are turning to advertising to help them bolster their image.
The Certified General Accountants have long been engaged in boosting the public’s knowledge about the work CGAs do and the Ontario Medical Association, the Ontario Chiropractic Association and the Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants have also undertaken splashy campaigns with radio and TV spots over the last few years.
But it’s the lawyers who have the biggest public perception problem, according to polling firm Ipsos Reid.
In its 2012 survey on trust, 75% of Canadians surveyed say they trusted their doctors, 48% their accountants, 43% their chiropractors, but only 25% gave lawyers high scores. (That still puts lawyers higher than politicians, actors, union leaders, CEOs and, ahem, advertising professionals, who earned a lowly 8%.)
Worse, their numbers have declined since the base study of 2003, where they scored 29%.
“Our members wanted us to do for lawyers, what [agencies] were doing for accountants and what they were doing for doctors,” says Paul Sweeny, past president of the OBA. “They wanted to see the portrayal of lawyers as what they really are, people who contribute to their community and society.”
The OBA researched public attitudes toward lawyers and found people liked and respected their own lawyers, but that wasn’t translating to the profession as a whole. They also canvassed their members, who saw themselves as problem solvers who not only helped their clients, but also contributed to their community. They took their findings to a number of agencies.
Agency59 warned them not to “put lawyers on a pedestal.”
“Our recommendation was to humanize the lawyer,” says Howlett. Agency59 came up with the idea of asking lawyers why they went to law school in the first place, which resonated with Sweeny.
The idea is to get “lawyers to reconnect with their own motivations for going to law school, because that’s a time when you’re enthusiastic,” says Sweeny.
The low-key campaign is in its very early stages. WhyIWentToLawSchool.ca includes a growing war chest of stories about members’ reasons for attending law school, and, using a template, lawyers can create ads or posters, with their own stories which they can use in their marketing materials and social media.
“The idea is to get the conversation started with the lawyers themselves,” says Sweeny. Once they have those stories they can assess them and decide where else to take it.
Stories produced so far focus on the injustices and hardships that drove lawyers to law school. None say they went to law school because the job pays well.
At this stage, the OBA campaign focuses solely on individuals, a contrast from other professions which focus more on the industry and how the professionals are making a difference. For example, the CGA’s “We see more than numbers” campaign examines how CGAs help businesses, while the OMA campaign talks about building a better health care system.
The OBA campaign is stirring up interesting discussion on SLAW, an influential legal industry blog where the efforts have been roundly criticized. Jordan Furlong, a law firm consultant and former legal trade publication editor, says the OBA’s “heart is in the right place,” but he pans the effort.
“For lawyers to come out and complain that they are not sufficiently loved is the worst kind of entitlement mentality,” he says.
“Telling people why they went to law school is not going to change people’s thinking. People don’t care one whit about this stuff.”
He says if lawyers want to change their image, they should stop focusing on themselves and create a campaign calling it “affordable justice” and explain how they are making the justice system more affordable and efficient and reducing delays.
Dave Hamilton, a creative partner at Grip Ltd. who works on the CGA campaign, says it started because students coming out of high school “didn’t want to become accountants. They saw it as boring. We needed to dispel that discourse [and show] accountants can be rock stars, at least in the business world.
“The biggest challenge in marketing any kind of professional designation is to get those professionals to park their own image of themselves, which is a lot sexier and more accessible than the rest of the world may think.”
It wasn’t always this bad for lawyers. In the 1940s and 1950s, Hollywood portrayed lawyers as zealots fighting injustice in movies like To Kill a Mockingbird or Anatomy of a Murder. But clearly by the 1990s that had changed – movie crowds cheered when a dinosaur in Jurassic Park ate an obnoxious lawyer.
So can lawyers regain the high ground? Can you really change the image of a profession that operates in a costly, litigious, adversarial environment where some clients win, others lose, but everyone pays a tidy sum?
“We may not change public opinion, but we may see a more accurate representation of lawyers – as someone with dreams and ambition,” says Sweeny.
Jim Middlemiss is a lawyer and writer.
