CHALLENGE

Thomson Reuters is the world’s leading source of news and information for professional markets. Practical Law is a Thomson Reuters service for the legal services industry. The information and resources provided by Practical Law are designed to make attorneys more efficient and empower them to provide more value for their clients and organizations. Practical Law is considered a trusted partner by both large and small firms and in-house counsel because of its breadth, depth, accuracy and timeliness of its data.

In an effort to differentiate from its competitors in the legal services space, Thomson Reuters sought to employ a thought leadership campaign focused on its talented staff of legal editors. Traditional media pitching was particularly challenging in this case because Thomson Reuters is a news service and many media outlets are unwilling to promote a competitor’s products and services. So the R&J team sought to utilize creative, non-traditional outlets to promote its staff, and by extension, the specialized legal expertise that they provide.

ACTION

• The team at R&J reached out to Legal Talk Network, the premier network for legal podcasts. When pitching Practical Law talent to appear on the network’s established programming, R&J realized there was a larger opportunity and proposed an entirely new program, produced and hosted by attorney editors on the Practical Law team.
• R&J facilitated the negotiations that created the new program, and worked closely with both teams to plan and script programming to resonate with the core audience of attorneys.

CONCLUSION

• By focusing on a new medium, R&J was able to circumvent traditional media publications and promote its client as thought leaders on the premier distribution channel for broadcasted legal content.
• “Down the Hall with Practical Law” benefits from access to the deep bench of talent at Practical Law, by leveraging an established podcasting brand, for immediate access to the brand’s targeted audience.
• R&J also provides Practical Law editors with written articles promoting the podcasts they are featured in. These promo articles for the podcast are then posted by the editors to LinkedIn Pulse and shared by Thomson Reuters social media pages for additional exposure. The podcast is also promoted on Thomson Reuters blogs for additional brand awareness and reach.
• While podcasting is a relatively new medium and there are few benchmarks measure success, the Practical Law podcast had nearly 2,800 unique downloads in its first month. For a niche industry, the program performed comparably better than other legal services podcasts, including one with noteworthy guests with a broader “celebrity” appeal.