Now the CLA appears keen to bear its teeth with the announcement that Brighton and Hove City Council has agreed to pay the agency an undisclosed sum to cover legal costs and retrospective licence fees as well as agreeing to take a CLA licence for the future.

The City Council has agreed to pay retrospective fees and future licencing charges

In a statement issued today, the CLA said lawyers acting for the Council had originally told CLA that it was not at risk of copyright infringement as it operated a ‘no copying’ policy, but evidence gathered by CLA showed that the policy had not worked and infringement was taking place.

Martin Delaney, CLA’s Legal Director, was pleased with the outcome of the case saying,

“I am delighted that Brighton and Hove City Council has accepted that it should take a CLA licence. It is only fair that authors, visual artists and publishers should be compensated for the use of their copyright works”.

He also stressed CLA’s continuing determination to investigate any reports of possible copyright infringement and to pursue councils or any other organisations that do not have a licence, but should have.

A CLA licence is normally required by businesses or public sector organisations to allow reproduction of electronic or online publications, copying and emailing of press cuttings and articles or photocopying and scanning from print books, journals or magazines. Failure to obtain the appropriate permission leaves an organisation open to legal action from CLA.

CLA monitors organisations where it is believed that illegal copying is taking place and investigates reports of copyright infringement in the workplace provided by individuals. If an organisation is found to be infringing copyright, then in some cases, its officers and employees can be held individually liable.

Comment

This issue is likely to be of increasing significance to law firm marketers and PR agencies alike. In a marketplace where the reproduction of content to clients and contacts forms an integral part of the press relations service, those responsible for carrying out such tasks should be aware of their licencing requirements.

Alan Davies: Because Life’s Complicated Enough

Readers with longish memories may remember Alan Davies fronting a series of adverts for the Abbey National a few years ago in which the phrase “Because Life’s Complicated Enough” was used to sell the Abbey’s products and services. If that strap line was appropriate for financial services, how much more must it resonate with HR consultants or small businesses trying to keep on top of employment law?

Access to justice is as much an issue for SMEs as for individuals, especially in a legal environment that is popularly said to favour employees.  The Government is trying to address that perception by consulting and introducing reforms that will roll back individual employment rights. Last year saw the length of continuous employment required for bringing an unfair dismissal claim increased from one to two years.

2013 will see issue and hearing fees introduced to Employment Tribunals; the maximum compensatory award will be restricted to the lesser of one year’s salary or £74,200 and redundancy consultation periods axed from 90 to 45 days.

On the face of it, that is all good news for hard pressed HR practitioners.  But, what about other thorny employment law issues?  How to handle employees who are frequently off sick? What about shared parental leave?  Can you lawfully ask an employee not to wear a religious symbol and was the case of Eweida good or bad news for employers?

Both HR and lawyers alike, sinking under the weight of change, may recall Stevie Smith’s poem “Not waving but drowning” but still the job has to be done. Larger organisations will probably have large HR functions, with access to well developed knowhow resources or bespoke advice from a law firm.  For smaller businesses they probably won’t have those luxuries.  How they can get the advice they need?

This is where legal PR can assist. Just as many potential “consumers” of legal advice may feel isolated, there will be many providers of advice looking for an audience to whom they can demonstrate their skills. There is no better platform than an article in a newspaper or magazine to show not only the legal knowledge to solve a problem but the ability to communicate succinctly and directly; qualities not often associated with the legal profession.  It’s a two-way street with both reader and writer benefiting.

Legal PR is often the act of informing, educating and perhaps even amusing an audience of individuals and businesses. Surely that has never been of greater importance than now.

Making sense of Alternative Business Structures

Has your firm spent the last few months pouring over its application for an ABS-licence? If so, the time to announce it to the press is probably looming.

It is an announcement which will most likely go through myriad hands before finally being set free and for the in-house press office; marketing manager or the external legal PR agency in charge, this is the time to push for a clear message about why alternative business structures should matter to clients and consumers.

For the trade media, Alternative Business Structures are big news. The legal services sector faces a major challenge as it awaits the introduction of the referral fee ban and speculation is rife with very few commentators willing or able to predict what the future may hold with any real confidence.

Therefore, providing clarity to business clients and consumers of legal services what this could mean for them is one of the most important communication challenges that law firms will face in 2013 and beyond.

For a quick picture of how the topic is regarded by the mainstream consciousness, type in ‘ABS law firms’ on The Telegraph’s website and the most relevant recent article to emerge today dated back to 2009 headlined “High street shops will sell legal services within two years …”

Although being able to provide legal services with non-lawyer involvement may be an earth-shattering development for a sector that has otherwise embraced change at a snail’s pace, mainstream journalists outside the legal and insurance sphere are embracing the topic with negligible enthusiasm.

If the legal sector wants to capture the attention of the wider press and, through it, the minds of consumers, the whole issue of ABS-licenses has to be made relevant outside the legal arena. Issues of regulation and compliance have little chance of battling with the mainstream news agenda.

What matters more, as our Legal Services Survey highlighted back in 2011, is personal persuasion and how consumers will seek out value for money. Our survey asked 500 consumers to highlight the most persuasive factor when deciding where to go for legal service. 43% opted for a personal recommendation, 17% demanded an up-front pricing structure with just 14% quoting ‘experience’ as the motive behind their decision. There is no reason to believe that much, if anything at all, has changed in this regard since those figures were compiled 18 months ago.

So, returning to the boardroom where the ABS license press release is being mulled over; this is where good legal PR comes into its own. If at least part of the objective with the press release is to raise the profile of the firm with consumers or business clients, then at least some of it has to set out why this matters to them. Then, and only then, will we begin to witness a pique in interest from mainstream journalists writing about the stuff that really matters to the non-lawyers amongst us.

The new app by The Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) makes it possible for copyright users to scan the ISN code of a book or magazine to find out whether they may legally copy from it under their CLA licence.

The CLA Title Search app delivers copyright permissions to users in seconds, explaining how extracts may be used: from sharing them via e-mail to storing them on a company intranet.
The CLA Title Search app enables users to:
• Search by scanning the ISBN / ISSN code of a title
• Search by manually entering the title or ISBN / ISSN
• Deliver permissions for photocopying, scanning and digital reproducing extracts from millions of books and magazines
• Contact CLA via direct dial, e-mail and social media
The CLA Title Search app expands on the CLA’s website title search (www.cla.co.uk/titlesearch) that was launched earlier this year. The initiative has been welcomed by major publishers signed up to CLA’s licensing scheme.
Jen Holton, Associate Director of Global Rights at John Wiley & Sons, said: “Naturally, publishers are concerned that CLA represents their rights and mandates effectively and that end-users respect their copyright. The CLA Title Search app is great news for publishers and end-users as it helps to communicate what can be copied under a CLA licence. End-users will now be able to quickly and easily identify which titles are available to copy.’

Kevin Fitzgerald, Chief Executive of CLA, said: “CLA aims to strike a balance between delivering value and growth for creators and publishers while using new platforms to deliver viable products and services to content users. The CLA Title Search app is a great example of something that achieves that balance and further simplifies the licensing process.”
The CLA Title Search is available to download free from the App Store and Google Play. Search ‘CLA Title Search’.

We all thought we had the key to tracking an advertising campaign when we realised what this meant: a voice at the end of the phone would ask; “and how did you find our company/service/product today?”

Providing you weren’t feeling mischievous and replied that your visit was prompted by divine intervention, your response would generate valuable data for the seller into the effectiveness of their marketing spend and everyone was happy.

While face to face and relationship marketing will probably remain the priority marketing spend for some people until closing time at the bar, many have acknowledged the increasing demand for online services and so the industry has had to go back to the drawing board by integrating digital channels into their campaign mix.

Potential customers can now be reached by so many means – email, Facebook, Twitter, banner advertising, search (pay per click) – that research firm Gartner said that by 2013, “lead management campaigns integrating 4 or more digital channels will outperform single- or dual-channel campaigns by 300%.”

Given this plethora of options, you’ll want to think carefully about allocating your spend in order to reach the correct audience, ensure you have the right means for monitoring their response and calculating your return on investment. Tools like Google Analytics offer a low cost option to help you understand this; by allocating tags to your digital marketing collateral, you can tell the software to identify visitors from various sources related to the campaign, so for example if they click on a link from your email newsletter you’ll have data to support this fact and the same for any other source you have used for your promotion.

Meanwhile, Facebook and Linkedin have shown steady growth as advertising platforms and thankfully the former offers integration between its ‘Facebook Insights’ monitoring software, Google Analytics and other affordable platforms like Hootsuite. Traffic sourced from Linkedin can also be tagged into Google Analytics, so generating interest from this predominantly business to business social network could be valuable for some.

Businesses are spoilt for choice with the number of free or affordable tools available that can implement; track and process data from a campaign. In a business environment where every penny counts, no strategic marketing plan should be without the means to measure success.

If you would like a free consultation to understand your options, contact us for more information.

However, PR is not a tool. It is the strategic practice which, some argue, overarches all other areas of communication. Asking whether social media will replace PR is like asking whether the hammer will one day render the toolbox obsolete.

PR professionals are having to expand their skill sets from writing attention-grabbing press releases and hard-hitting opinion articles to summarising corporate messages into 140 characters.

Somehow, I find it not too dissimilar to the change from sending press releases in the post (sometimes embargoed for two days or more) to emailing journalists instead. Some took to it like ducks to water; others needed a little longer to accept this ‘new’ way of working. In the end everyone got there.

We don’t need the country’s most experienced communications strategists to go on a technology course to learn how to use the latest social media aggregator software. Neither do we need them to teach managers about who to poke and who to like.

They need to do what they did five and ten years ago; devise a strategy and set out key messages to help businesses achieve their strategic objectives. Then, and only then, is it time to decide which channels are best used to communicate with stakeholders. And at this point, strategists will do well to engage with those who have immersed themselves into social media to understand how to make the most of it.

Social media is just a toolkit. It is a brilliant, exciting and fast-moving one that is changing the way we communicate. Businesses should embrace its potential. They should assess the risks and devise a plan for dealing with it. They should implement policies for using it in the workplace.

PR professionals must stay ahead or at least keep up with these trends. But sound, established principles of communications still remain as valid as they were ten years ago. Am I worried that social media will render PR obsolete? Not even a little.

Things have changed since then, but the game remains the same: Find your audience, target them with a message and follow it up.

The question is how do you work the available media channels to your advantage? On first glance the options seem somewhat bleak as media experts consistently sound the death knell for regional newspapers. To put that in context figures published by international media business Group M, reported that while the UK was spending 13% of its advertising money on regional newspapers in 2008, that figure is expected to be around 7% in 2013. But don’t be fooled completely; regional weekly newspapers are fighting back with 25% of the market actually increasing sales during 2011 and strong growth forecast for most UK regional press websites.

When you add to the mix the additional outlets of regional radio and television, the potential audience for a good local story is clear. Law firms must therefore ask themselves when considering an integrated PR and marketing campaign whether they have a good one.

Thinking for a moment beyond Legal 500 rankings and which tier you’re on with Chambers & Partners for which advertising is tailor made, law firms must look to their customers to explain the value of professional advice. The customer telling their own story about how a successful claim was made will appeal to a journalist and can by association enable a law firm to achieve recognition within the story. If you can meet the challenge of persuading customers to tell the story, it’s a good bet they’ll do it convincingly.

Tips for local and regional PR & Marketing campaigns:

1)       Research your target audience. Use resources such as the Audit Bureau of Circulation and Press Gazette to provide you with a clear idea of which publications people are reading and why.

2)       Build a case study culture into your marketing process: When interesting cases happen, become the news reporter yourself.

3)       Ensure any online content you place is actively monitored for sharing activity by deploying keyword searches on social media platforms.

4)       Consider a dedicated web page or site to support the key message of your campaign. Try to enable some data capture within this and consider augmenting visitor numbers with online advertising such as banners, pay per click, Facebook or Linkedin.

5)       Every campaign should have a beginning, middle and an end. Make sure yours does so you can measure its effectiveness.

6)       Don’t demand a return on investment for PR alone, it has got to be integrated with sales and marketing budgets and targets.

If you would like to learn more about implementing an integrated PR & Marketing campaign for your law firm, contact us for more information.

Whether photocopying and circulating an article to the sales team, or e-mailing press cuttings to the board of directors, the title search allows licensees to quickly confirm whether the activity is compliant with the terms of their CLA licence.

According to the CLA, the title search has been developed in response to research with key customer groups and designed to complement existing website support for included and excluded licence material. James Bennett, Licence Development Manager, says: ‘We are always looking for ways to help customers comply with the terms of their CLA licence. Our new title search tool enables customers to find out whether they can copy or reuse extracts from a publication in a matter of seconds’.

Customers select their licence type and the type of copying they wish to perform, before searching by title or ISN to receive a list of permissions.

The title search is now available at www.cla.co.uk/licences/title-search-law .

Award entries can be a challenge for law firm marketers

But for law firm marketers this presents a significant challenge. With so few means of comparison available (winningest, quickest, cheapest, nicest?) where should law firm marketers turn for a bit of differentiation?

For many firms, awards provide the answer. In any given year, a firm has at least half a dozen opportunities from the legal sector’s own round of gongs and that is before considering the ever increasing number of categories which pop up in associated industries, where the not insignificant carrot of receiving praise in front of one’s target customers can be very attractive.

Awards are, for relatively little investment an excellent means of profile raising and keeping up appearances, and for that reason have become one of the most competitive areas in which a law firm marketer could operate.

By way of example, I moonlight as a judge on the insurance industry’s annual UK Broker Awards, in which the typical volume of entrants per category regularly tops 40 companies or individuals. Given that this ceremony is directed at a sector (brokers) within a sector (general insurance), it’s easy to see why the clamour for recognition has become so fierce.

That being said, here’s a few tips from someone who’s written and judged his fair share of entries:

Tips for entering awards

1) Understand the rules – how strong is your case?

One of a solicitors’ jobs is to understand the rules to the extent that he or she can predict whether a case will or won’t be successful. One of the law firm marketers’ jobs is to understand the rules of an award category to the extent that he or she can predict whether a case will or won’t be successful.

So far so simple, but the law firm marketer has to manage expectations both of their partnership/management and attempt to build a story that fits with the criteria they’ve been given.

2) Get your evidence together

There was a time when reams of supporting material could be submitted and in certain cases this is still possible, but for obvious reasons (time, losing the will to live) judges cannot be expected to digest a lever-arch filed dissertation 40 times for every category they are assessing.

Your supporting evidence should tell a story succinctly; perhaps your customer satisfaction survey can be summed up in a single percentage, or your case management cycle time improvements could be described in the simplest possible terms?

3) Are you really exceptional?

Think about what you are being asked to describe. Truly exceptional performance or service has to be demonstrably the case; anything less will be overlooked so stay honest and make sure the evidence supports your claims.

4) Demonstrate how it’s part of the strategy

Few organisations have a strategic objective to win awards, but a great many have the intention to be the best in their field. Law firm marketers should be aware of the business’ strategic direction and be able to show that when entering awards, the submission represents the culmination of a collective goal.

The new licence, introduced by The Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA), gives licensed firms the permission to copy from thousands of e-books, online journals and free-to-view websites.

The licence includes the permission needed to share digital material with colleagues, associates and clients in relation to a specific case and store digital copies on intranets.

Licensed firms will also benefit from blanket protection against vicarious liability which arises from copyright infringement in the workplace.

Paul Maillardet, Business Development Manager, at the CLA said: ‘We have already received considerable interest in the new licence, from large international corporations, to smaller firms. In a single transaction, the new law licence gives law professionals the permission to copy and reproduce content from law reports, journals, books, digital publications and websites and we expect demand will be high’.

]]> http://www.rtsmedia.co.uk/blog/2012/05/30/law-firms-encouraged-to-buy-new-copyright-licence/feed/ 0