J U N E 2 0 0 8 © 2 0 0 8 C a n a d i a n L a w y e r M a g a z i n e I n c . R e p r i n t e d w i t h p e r m i s s i o n . © 2 0 0 8 C a n a d i a n L a w y e r M a g a z i n e I n c . R e p r i n t e d w i t h p e r m i s s i o n . J U N E 2 0 0 8

As Lisa Borsook, manag-ing partner of Toronto’s WeirFoulds LLP, dips her hand into a glass bowl and fi shes around

for the winning business card, the ten-sion in the crowd is palpable. Once she reads out the name, the winner’s shriek could have been heard for kilometres. This wasn’t your average draw for playoff tickets — we’re talking about a pair of Jimmy Choo shoes, and when it comes to ladies footwear, they’re a big deal.

Law firms are starting to understand not only the power of the women in their ranks but also the business case

for attracting and communicating with a growing number of women clients.

A step in the right direction

PHOTOGRAPHY: LOATES PHOTOGRAPHY

Lisa Borsook, left, and Lori Duffy of WeirFoulds LLP at the

Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto where the firm held a

women-only event for current and prospective clients —

featuring a spring fashion show by Holt Renfrew, with Chanel

providing makeup touchups, all while guests sipped champagne.

The draw for the shoes was just one of several giveaways held during a Weir-Foulds Women event at the Bata Shoe Museum. The women-only event fea-tured a spring fashion show by Holt Ren-frew, and Chanel provided makeup touch ups while guests sipped champagne. This was not your average law fi rm event, but WeirFoulds isn’t your average law fi rm — especially when it comes to its inter-nal women’s group and its external mar-keting efforts directed at women.

Lori Duffy, a partner and chairwoman

of WeirFoulds Women, says the group started as an “undercover operation” more than 15 years ago. Duffy held an annual barbecue in her backyard for the women at the fi rm to come together and exchange ideas on marketing, dealing with clients, career clothing, and so on. The group eventually expanded its focus to host events that included female cli-ents, and with three major client events under her belt, Duffy says it’s a process of trial and error to get it right. “I think we got it right this time,” she says. “We

had a location that was convenient, the time of day was good, and it had an ele-ment of fun.”

When asked how she came up with the idea, Duffy says, “I just wanted to see Holt Renfrew’s spring launch,” she jokes. But ultimately Duffy and WeirFoulds Women design events that they them-selves would enjoy attending. But the fi rm’s effort to market to women isn’t all fun and games and shoes. “Our ambition is not just to get to know each other but for our clients to get to know us and to

B Y K I R S T E N M C M A H O N

J U N E 2 0 0 8 © 2 0 0 8 C a n a d i a n L a w y e r M a g a z i n e I n c . R e p r i n t e d w i t h p e r m i s s i o n . © 2 0 0 8 C a n a d i a n L a w y e r M a g a z i n e I n c . R e p r i n t e d w i t h p e r m i s s i o n . J U N E 2 0 0 8

know what we can do for them,” explains Borsook. “There are a lot of different marketing goals that can be achieved by these kinds of events.”

Their larger events include a guest list of their own clients, the female clients of their male colleagues at the fi rm, and a “wish list” of businesswomen who aren’t yet WeirFoulds’ clients. “I even had one client actually send me fl owers the next day because she had such a good time and because she made a client contact,” says Duffy. “We got several handwrit-ten notes in a day and age where people rarely do that.”

As more women leave private practice and enter the corporate world as in-house counsel, more women are in charge of doling out legal work to law fi rms. It’s a market segment that smart fi rms are tak-ing note of and tailoring their marketing efforts towards. At Borden Ladner Ger-vais LLP, a national women’s committee is in place under the fi rm’s professional development committee, explains Lynn McGrade, a partner at the Toronto of-fi ce. “I think the business development committee saw an increasing role for women leaders in the community and women making decisions about where to send their legal work,” she says of why the group was formed.

The group looked at whether the fi rm needed to improve business-develop-ment tools when marketing to women, and gave lawyers the access to the rel-evant information, tools, and resources they needed for ongoing business-devel-opment activities. “We wanted to take a real focused look at what networking op-portunities are out there and make sure that our lawyers knew those opportuni-ties were out there,” she says. Women-centred client events at BLG include golf tournaments in Vancouver and Mon-treal, and a speaker series in Toronto, at which clients are welcomed at a cock-tail reception followed by a salon with a prominent female guest. Past speak-ers include Margaret Atwood, Roberta

Bondar, Jeanne Beker, and Elizabeth May. “It’s been very popular, actually, and the mailing list has grown from 270 contacts to 740 contacts,” says McGrade.

Two associates at Cox & Palmer in Halifax, Michelle Kelly and Robin Ait-ken, realized their fi rm’s traditional cli-ent events were falling short when it came to their female clients. “Robin and I were talking, and we were just saying how most of the marketing events that we’re told to go to, and a lot of things that the fi rm puts on for clients, are re-ally geared towards men,” recalls Kelly. “The background is a sporting event most of the time, and the networking format is men in business suits standing around and talking to one another.”

The fi rm now has an annual female cli-ent event where it rents out a spa for the night and serves martinis and desserts and offers mini spa services to attendees. But this isn’t just a night of manis and pedis. “It was amazing. Women found common threads to talk about with one another. There were great connections that were made and there was this in-tense vibe that went around the room where women were just opening up, and I don’t think women are really able to open up at the male-geared marketing events,” Kelly says. “We have a chance to recognize our existing clients and build relationships with our existing clients in this women-only setting. In addition to that, all of our clients are developing dif-ferent business clients for themselves.”

These types of activities are on the right track for attracting women and should be part of a broader marketing strategy, says Cristi Cooke, founder of Majority Mar-keting, a consultancy that helps compa-nies attract, retain, and increase sales to women. “Women are more attracted to events that empower, educate, and enter-tain them, and connect them. One of the main challenges that women business ex-ecutives have is getting exposed to those informal networks.”

While these types of events are a piece

Cristi Cooke, founder of Majority Marketing, explains that women tend to differ from men in the ways they com-municate, socialize, make decisions, and manage their time.

“Men tend to use language a lot more to talk about data and facts and statistics, in order to prove and demon-strate expertise, whereas women tend to use language more often to build and maintain relationships,” she says. “They focus on finding things in com-mon and sharing experiences and feel-ing understood.”

Cooke says lawyers should ask ques-tions that allow a woman to feel under-stood. “What’s keeping you up at night with respect to this area of your busi-ness?” is better than “What is the legal issue you are having problems with?”

“Do you see how this question is so much more holistic? It really gets to the vulnerabilities of where the woman is feeling exposed,” she says. “This is not a question necessarily that would work with a male counterpart, because you don’t want to ask a lot of questions to men that expose vulnerabilities.”

Next time you’re at an event, take note of the different ways in which men and women socialize, says Cooke. “Men build relationships by doing activities together, while women build relation-ships by sharing conversations together. Men build relationships shoulder to shoulder while women build relation-ships face to face.”

Law firms generally stick to shoulder-to-shoulder events like golf because “they’ve built their business based on the male-style norms — which is fine, that’s what worked because most of their clients were men — but this is why golf tournaments and hockey games work well with male clients but the tick-ets go unused and unappreciated by their female counterparts.”

A key consideration when planning client events with women is the time constraints they face, says Cooke. Stats show that women who work full time still shoulder the majority of household and childcare duties. This is why all-day golfing may not fly with female clients.

“If you’re going to have a golf tourna-ment for your company, fine, but make it nine holes.” — KM

What women want?

of the marketing-to-women puzzle, smart law fi rms will recognize this is not a gender issue, it’s a business is-sue, explains Cooke. “When you arm the minority of your fi rm — because, when you look at the partnership level in law fi rms, you only have 20 per cent women — to deal with one of the largest untapped markets, you’re not thinking about it as a business imperative, you’re genderizing the issue. You really want to arm all of the lawyers in your law fi rm to understand what women clients want.”

Cooke says while men and women should be seen as equals, they shouldn’t be viewed as being the same. It’s key to know and understand the ways in which men and women differ in their commu-nication styles, decision-making, social-izing, etc. “You don’t paint it pink. What you really need to do is train your law-yers to understand what are those fun-damental differences towards approach-ing business that men and women have. And that’s what the lawyers need to un-derstand. We’re talking about market-ing. It’s so easy to get confused and say, ‘This is a gender issue; this is a political-correctness thing.’ It has nothing to do with that. This is a new market that peo-ple are trying to understand. Once you understand how the market segment thinks, it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman.”

Cooke says law fi rms aren’t fully get-ting it and may underestimate the size and scope of the women’s market seg-ment. Aside from the women who have moved in-house from law fi rms, women lead 60 per cent of all new start-up com-panies, and by 2010 one million women will own a small business, according to a CIBC report on women entrepreneurs.

One fi rm that has paid attention to these statistics is Lang Michener LLP. Carol Lyons, a partner at the Toronto of-fi ce, explains it has an informal women’s group that aims to promote its female associates and develop ways to market to female clients. Lyons — like most others

interviewed for this article — is reticent when asked in depth about the fi rm’s particular efforts. Lang Michener’s web site has a page devoted to services for female entrepreneurs and touts it as “a cross-disciplinary practice group spe-cifi cally targeted to meeting the needs of women entrepreneurs. Our lawyers provide personalized, practical and cost-effi cient legal advice tailored to the busi-

ness objectives and management style of women entrepreneurs.”

“We wanted the women at all of our three offi ces to participate,” says Lyons. “We didn’t want this to just be a Toronto initiative. By including the other offi ces, it broadens the base of expertise and ser-vices that we can provide.” While Lyons doesn’t further expand on the initiative, she says: “I don’t want to give away any tricks of the trade, but, to be honest, we haven’t come up with some kind of pan-acea that’s going to rock the world.”

Cooke says it’s important to keep in mind that you can’t rely on a spa day or volunteers to create the whole market-ing strategy for your fi rm. “More people are realizing this, but [law fi rms] are still behind,” she says. “You can’t rely on a team of women volunteers in your of-fi ce to create what really is a business strategy. I don’t mean that in a conde-scending way to the women’s initiatives;

I think they can be a wonderful portion of a strategy, but it is a small portion of a strategy. You’ve got to train everybody in the fi rm.”

One fi rm that has offered fi rm-wide training on marketing to women is Thackray Burgess, an innovative oil and gas boutique in Calgary. Michael Thack-ray, a shareholder at the fi rm, says he heard Cooke speak at a conference a few years ago and it occurred to him that the male-heavy fi rm (as it was at the time) was ignoring how to attract and retain fe-male lawyers. He invited Cooke to run an in-house seminar on these issues, as well as on the topic of marketing to women. “More and more female general counsel, more and more women are making deci-sions as to who to use [for legal services]. Ignore the females at your peril in Cal-gary. Just as a word to the wise,” he says.

Thackray Burgess launched an inter-nal women’s group in 2006, and Cooke helped the fi rm defi ne its mandate and terms of reference. “It’s been hugely successful,” says Thackray, who reports there are now almost as many women as men at the fi rm.

Cooke says a blend of female-client events and fi rm-wide initiatives to help understand the market segment will help; however, “a women’s going to choose you if you’re a good lawyer. If you’re the best lawyer she can fi nd, if you communicate in her language, if you understand her time pressures, and if you can under-stand how she makes decisions.”

She says one industry that is getting it right is home-improvement companies. “They’re hugely picking up on the wom-en’s market, but they don’t paint it pink,” Cooke says. “They don’t rely on having women’s golf games to sell home-im-provement products. They widened their aisles, they cleaned up their stores, they started training their people that women actually make the majority of decisions when it comes to home im-provement, and they’ve seen their profi ts increase unbelievably.”

“You really want to arm all of the law-

yers in your law firm to understand what

women clients want.”— CRISTI COOKE,

MAJORITY MARKETING