Beth Fegan was a senior partner as a national law firm, leading the firm’s work supporting women’s rights issues. Among her notable cases there, Beth represented many of the women who were sexually assaulted by Harvey Weinstein. In late 2019, after more than a decade leading the practice group, Beth decided that it was time to set sail with her own firm. To hear Beth tell the story, “Firmani + Associates was my first phone call after making the decision.” We had previously represented her now-former firm for more than 20 years, having resigned the account in 2018.

Beth needed to quickly establish her firm to maintain the confidence of ongoing clients and other referral sources who counted on the services and expertise of a big firm. She also ramped up her firm’s growth right at the onset of COVID-19. Beth also saw opportunity where others did not. She took the bold move of presciently creating a completely virtual law firm, one without a central office, and hired the best and brightest from markets across the country. While legacy firms were struggling with the stranded costs, complexities and machinations while running traditional law firms, Beth was able to focus her energies on launching a flexible and responsive firm. At the same time, she needed to defend against the long-held but quickly changing perception that unless you had an office in downtown Chicago, her hometown, you weren’t a true player in the high-stakes area of law in which she focused. Her mandate to us was, essentially, “make my firm look solid, substantial and savvy, and do it in short order.”

Our first action was to establish a name and brand identify for the firm. We landed on a traditional name with a typographic application: FeganScott, leveraging the brand equity in Beth’s surname. We then followed our established branding methodology, delving into the firm’s brand attributes and distinctions, feeding those findings into our work on the firm’s graphic identity. Concurrently we were building the architecture of the firm’s website, with the intent to demonstrate FeganScott’s heft, resources, talent and temperament to take on significant cases, even as Beth was staffing up the firm. We next heralded FeganScott to its key audiences. In addition to traditional media-relations activity, we focused on one of FeganScott’s new, high-profile cases to demonstrate the firm’s gravitas. The case was a tragic situation in which a group of NCAA track athletes came forward and accused their coach of systematically grooming them as minors and abusing them during their collegiate athletic careers. We created a comprehensive program to share the news of the filing, marrying traditional media relations with a focused digital media campaign. We created a 30-minute broadcast-quality video asset, allowing the athletes to tell their stories in a highly compelling fashion that we could never capture as powerfully in the written word. The interviews captured media interest and resonated as digital marketing content in a campaign focused on leveraging paid social across Facebook, a platform we knew would garner optimal results due to its focus on storytelling. To spread awareness, we utilized detailed targeting based on demographics and location to share the athletes’ story. Then, to boost engagement, we built out soundbite clips to quickly draw in viewers and emphasize the importance of amplifying the athletes’ voices as survivors. By amplifying content across platforms, we weaved together athletes’ powerful messages while highlighting Beth’s advocacy.

Our efforts returned great results. The athletes’ story garnered a major story in USA Today and the Associated Press and syndicated versions of the story appeared in newspapers across the country. After the publication of the story, the coach in question resigned his position coaching high-school girls and has had his ability to coach severely restricted as the case is litigated.   The NCAA track athletes’ case was our first major effort to leverage the firm’s social media presence. For that campaign alone, we garnered more than 30,000 impressions across all platforms over a mere five days. This included over 3,500 video thru-plays, an important marker of success that even led to other athletes reaching out to the firm to share their stories. And the NCAA campaign was only a small piece of our larger efforts to cement FeganScott within the cultural lexicon. In order to increase the firm’s brand awareness, over the course of a year, we increased impressions across social platforms by 203%. And, after the development of their new website, we captured nearly 60,000 page views in six months.   In addition to using digital marketing strategies across Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, we generated 2.94 million impressions using Google Ads, building a sizeable footprint for the firm’s extended outreach nationwide.   Across all paid and organic digital marketing efforts, we garnered 277 conversions over the course of eight months. As the firm takes on new cases, we have quickly scaled these efforts and have reached nearly 400,000 people for various highly specific cases through our digital marketing strategies alone.