Category: Media Coverage

Commwiser, a specialised Indian communications agency into the legal and professional services space, has joined hands with Mirovia, a global network of PR agencies providing specialist communications, marketing and business development advice across borders to legal sector clients.

With Commwiser being a part of Mirovia, it broadens its reach across Europe, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Commwiser India currently has its presence in India and Canada.

This also presents Commwiser with an opportunity to enhance its service offerings, broaden its horizons, and access a variety of specialised talents and resources in the field of legal marketing, paving the way for more comprehensive client support.

Aman Abbas, Co-founder and CEO at Commwiser, commented:

“The Mirovia network truly matches the nature of the legal market – global, collaborative and quality-driven. As part of this global network of legal marketing firms, members are well placed to add value to clients who have similar aspirations. We are excited to be a part of this excellent bunch of professionals as this gives us the capability to support our clients’ growth requirements in different parts of the world.

Commwiser India would also benefit from Mirovia’s unmatched specialised capabilities in litigation PR and handling Class Action suits in India. This is another milestone in Commwiser’s speciality in the legal industry in India, which has been recognised time and again by the industry.”

We just witnessed history being made in the Indian legal industry. The Bar Council of India has made a significant decision to allow foreign lawyers and law firms to practice foreign law, international law, and international arbitration matters in India on a reciprocal basis.

The move will boost confidence among foreign investors and improve FDI flow to the country. International Arbitration in India will also benefit. Overall, its a win-win situation for all – Indian lawyers, foreign lawyers and most importantly for clients and the country as India progresses towards becoming the world’s third-largest economy by 2030.

We believe it’s a large step in the right direction and all stakeholders will see upsides in one way or another. There will certainly be more competition for law firms, but the pie should also increase with more FDI flow and arbitration matters coming in. It will also bring more competitiveness which will drive quality of services and innovation levels up.

The Indian legal sector has welcomed this move. The conversation had been going on for quite some time now and the industry is now fully geared up to take on the foreign competition now. The best Indian lawyers are most certainly at par with the best talent globally.

However, one of the main contentions from Indian industry was a level playing field. In India, lawyers were not allowed to promote their practice in any way, including having a website or advertise, whether in print or digitally. On the other hand, there are no restrictions in most developed markets as far as practice promotion is concerned. Since the internet knows few boundaries, the concern has been that spillover may give foreign firms with strong global brands an edge.

So, it is yet to be seen what kind of BD tools Indian lawyers may be allowed to leverage to be able to compete well in the market. However, the existing constraints have made Indian lawyers more resilient and some of the evolved practices in India used classic thought leadership marketing that has positioned them well in India, as well as globally.

However, most of the big players in India will now have to up their game since practice promotion has historically not been a top priority and is an underinvested area within Indian firms.

As we all know, many foreign law firms already have relationships with Indian clients through their investments around the world and they have done many high value transactions for them in the past. With their sophisticated BD support system, it is expected that international firms will move in to increase their workflow from Indian clients, leveraging these existing relationships. But there will also be many more opportunities for international and Indian firms to collaborate to better serve their clients.

International firms now face interesting choices about if, when and how to enter the Indian market with a presence on the ground. You could expect to see the most global firms, which are well versed in navigating markets only partially open to foreign lawyers, to be the first movers. It is notable for example that Baker McKenzie was the first global firm to be commenting to the press welcoming the news. Then there are the firms who have long invested in their relationships with Indian clients and indeed Indian law firms. Not all of these are global firms but there are quite a few of them and we would expect them to also be prioritising market entry.

However, firms will be cautious and will take great care to play by the rules and respect the progressive step India has taken through beginning to open its legal market. Whether they open through small representative offices which they grow over time, joint ventures or even at some point mergers with Indian firms, this will take time and there will be no immediate flood of change. Those entering the Indian market will need to carefully consider their messaging and get their PR strategy right. Opening in India is not “just another office” – within a decade India is set to be one of the big three economies alongside the US and China. Firms must get their entry right.

To end with an old adage from the technology industry, things change more slowly than we expect, but more quickly than we realise. Don’t expect a flood of foreign firm announcements tomorrow, but do expect the legal market in India to look quite different by 2025 compared with today…

In the legal profession, traditionally a lot of business ‘walked-in’ based on the reputation of a firm or due to equity created by some prominent lawyers in the firm. However, with intense competition among firms that have similar kind of talent pool and increased pricing pressure, a lot of marketing push is needed. It is an established fact that high growth firms spend more on their BD and marketing compared to their peers with slow growth. However, spending more is not enough. Marketing works effectively when they are tied with the firm’s strategy and planned meticulously for the whole financial year as a part of long-term planning.

In your everyday life, as a senior partner, you are swamped with mails offering double spread profiling opportunities that would reach millions of your prospective customers. Or you are offered an event that gets all the ‘decision-makers’ to listen to your proposition. But mostly, all those opportunities are paid ones. You reject a few by your gut feeling but end up accepting some of them, often due to sheer persuasion of the sales guys. You end up spending your precious marketing dollars only to learn that you are going to reject ‘this one’ next year. And this gets repeated.

We need to look at marketing more strategically. In this competitive environment, it is important to understand why a client should choose you among many offering the same kind of services. For that, you need to recognize yourself – who you are, what you stand for, what are your markets and why you.

The firms which excel do invest in people, technology, processes and other touchpoints with their clients. In addition to the traditional 4 Ps of marketing – Product, Price, Place and Promotion, Booms and Bitner added another three elements particularly in the context of the service industry, which are – People, Process and Physical Evidence. Therefore, strategically speaking, when you think of marketing, you must think of all these elements in your advance marketing strategy. However, in this article, we would be discussing more fundamental issues.

‘Recognizing yourself’ is the first step in which senior management must do guided and dispassionate discussions on top of data points. Everyone is not everything. The biggest mistake we make is when we put our hands in many things, spend marketing dollars on several things and don’t get the results. So, we need to define what the firm stands for.

The discussion should be to figure out what worked well for the firm historically and therefore build further on it, which way the wind is blowing so invest in it, what are low hanging fruits, which must be immediately grabbed and what are the long-term objectives of the firm.

A well-articulated strategic direction that comes from the above discussion is the solid backbone of marketing planning. The planning needs to have three-year horizon with one year’s activities defined along with budgets.

This needs to be mapped on the ‘knowledge’ of available marketing opportunities in relevant markets. For instance, if you are trying to make an impact in a market for a particular service, you ought to know where the target audience can be found and offer them the knowledge they care about. And this needs to be done repeatedly with follow-up actions already defined in the plan.

Another key element in achieving BD and marketing goals is to clearly define the roles of BD and Marketing teams. This is often the most neglected area of law firms in India, which must be addressed.

Proper marketing planning also flows in the roles and responsibilities of the BD and marketing team, makes their evaluation process scientific that helps both the team and the organization. When marketing is planned, the efforts are aligned with the firm’s objectives and marketing spend is optimized to achieve the organizational goals.

Artificial intelligence (AI) has rapidly become an essential tool for lawyers around the world, and India is no exception. With the advent of powerful language models like GPT, legal professionals in India can leverage the power of AI to improve their efficiency and achieve better outcomes. In  this article, we explore the many ways in which GPT can be used by lawyers in India and its limitations on the same.

As legal professionals strive to streamline their practice and stay ahead of the curve, many are turning to innovative technology to improve their efficiency and productivity. Among the most promising of these tools is ChatGPT, a state-of-the-art language model developed by OpenAI, whose goal is to make AI systems more natural and safer to interact with.

For those who do not know about this yet, ChatGPT is based on the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) architecture, which is a deep learning model that uses unsupervised learning to  generate human-like text. It is trained on a massive amount of text data, which enables it to understand and generate natural language with a high degree of accuracy and fluency.

ChatGPT can do a wide range of language tasks such as language translation, text summarization, text completion, text generation, text classification, and question answering.

Wouldn’t it be fascinating if we were to incorporate this tool in our legal practice?

ChatGPT can be used by lawyers in legal research. With GPT’s ability to quickly process and  analyze vast amounts of data, lawyers can swiftly identify relevant case law and statutes, saving  precious time and improving the accuracy of their research. This can be especially beneficial in the Indian legal system, where a large volume of legal precedents and statutes exist.

Another area where GPT can help is in document drafting. Whether you are creating contracts, briefs, or pleadings, it can provide valuable assistance by generating clear, coherent text that can  be edited and reviewed by lawyers before final submission. Additionally, the model’s predictive coding capabilities can help lawyers quickly and efficiently identify relevant documents during  the discovery process, thus saving time and resources.

GPT can also aid in summarizing complex legal documents, such as contracts and court rulings, to help lawyers understand and identify key points and arguments. This can be especially useful for those dealing with substantial amounts of information and need to quickly grasp the essential details. Additionally, it can assist in translating legal documents and contracts between languages, which can be particularly useful for international law practices and cross-border transactions.

In addition to the above, this mighty tool can also assist in writing legal briefs and memorandum by providing suggestions for legal arguments and citations, and it can be used to analyze contracts by identifying key clauses and provisions and providing summaries of the terms and  conditions.

Furthermore, its document classification capabilities can help lawyers quickly and easily sort and organize large numbers of documents, including those that may be in hard-copy form and need  to be converted using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology, a technology that  converts images or scanned documents into text. This can be particularly useful for lawyers who need to classify old or hard-copy documents that may not be in digital form.

Moreover, GPT can also be integrated with voice-enabled devices to provide lawyers with a hands-free way to access legal information and perform research tasks. This can be especially beneficial for those who are always on the move or for those who prefer voice commands over typing. By integrating GPT with voice-enabled devices, lawyers can easily access legal information and perform research tasks without the need for a keyboard or mouse.

As a language model, ChatGPT has some limitations that lawyers should be aware of:

1. Lack of legal expertise: While ChatGPT has been trained on a large amount of legal text  data, it does not have the same level of legal expertise as a human lawyer. Lawyers should  always review and verify any information generated by the model before relying on it.
2. Limited context awareness: ChatGPT operates based on the input it receives, so its  responses will be limited by the context and information provided. This means that if the  input is incomplete or ambiguous, the model’s output may also be incomplete or  ambiguous, as currently, the tool only has data till the year 2021.
3. Bias in the training data: ChatGPT is trained on a large amount of text data, which may contain biases. These biases can be reflected in the model’s output, which may result in inaccurate or unfair results.
4. Limited understanding of legal concepts: Although ChatGPT can understand and generate text in a human-like way, it may not fully understand the legal concepts and terminology used in the text.
5. Reliance on the model: It is important to note that ChatGPT is a tool, not a substitute for human lawyers. It can assist lawyers in their work, but it cannot replace the human judgement, creativity, and critical thinking of a lawyer.

The use of AI in the legal industry is a boon for the Indian legal system if you take it as a boon. AI based tools like GPT can help lawyers to process copious amounts of data, identify relevant information, and make better-informed decisions quickly and efficiently. It can also help to automate repetitive tasks and reduce the time and resources required to complete them. GPT represents a powerful and versatile tool that can help lawyers to simplify their work and achieve better outcomes.

AI is here to stay, and it is a no brainer. It could be a threat if you take it as a threat. However, the intention of AI is to make your work easier and drive you to become more efficient. Same is  the case with ChatGPT. It does have limitations at this point, and while one should not completely rely on this tool, using it judiciously can pave the way of growth for a lawyer’s practice. Presently, the tool is free to use, and it only makes sense for us to experiment and explore, find out how we can leverage it to our benefit.

It is a common occurrence to witness a few Senior Advocates being sought after for their expertise and services, even when there are many with similar qualifications. It is this handful of them who are often invited to prestigious events, quoted in articles, and receive an influx of client requests. It leads us to a question: What sets them apart and how?

This is where a few tips can come into play, where a few have already leveraged social media for themselves. In today’s time and competition within the Legal Industry, it has also become imperative for Senior Advocates to consider practice development. This is a valuable tool where you can influence people’s perception of you when you are not around.

As a Senior Advocate, with years of practice comes a lot of responsibilities. One of the most underrated responsibilities is to manage their reputation – offline & digitally! One spends many years practicing in the Bar to become a Senior Advocate. While this is an achievement of its own, nothing should go unnoticed.

Today, your reputation speaks for you. It tells your clients, colleagues and professional circle about your skills, expertise, personality, and experience. Most importantly, it throws a light on your story! A story that resonates with a few, a story that inspires a few.

One must carefully curate digital strategies in achieving goals by leveraging their reputation and expertise. Here is what you can do for your practice’s development –

Contemplate your story. You could be a Senior Advocate exclusively working on criminal matters or civil. Your expertise could be in M&A, or your interests in something very non-law. Think through how you wish to be seen in front of people. Do you wish to highlight extensive knowledge about your subject, which you don’t express very often, or would you want to direct it towards your client commitment and passion that clients can vouch for? Your experience, pedigree, your social standing, voluntary work – anything could speak for you but what is it that you want? Once this is chalked out, your position becomes clearer.

This is then followed by highlighting important things about yourself on your social media profiles (LinkedIn primarily). Tweak the headline by adding your designation, your interests, practice. Instead of just writing words, think of a narrative where you are also mentioning how you help your clients. Turn the creator mode on. Use hashtags of the things that interest you. A robust LinkedIn profile can take you and your practice a long way!

We are currently living in a very accessible era. Clients can get information on a lawyer by a single online search. Development Tips for Senior Advocates Their choice to collaborate/work with you depends on what they see on the internet about you. Even an invisible user can perceive you based on the content you share. So, is just positioning yourself on your profile enough?

Networking and engaging with the network are as important as positioning yourself. They go together as networking would be pointless if people do not know you, and vice versa. Being accessible to people who might need your help professionally. Be humble, reach out to people whose posts and experiences you resonate with and let them know. A single conversation can make a difference. Do not shy away from adding somebody to your network. Remember, your network is your net worth!

The human instinct these days is that one always “googles” somebody they are meeting for the first time, in a professional set-up. For a Senior Advocate, it becomes even more important to create a strong impression because of the position they are in. These include media coverage, information about you from a Wikipedia Page that talks about you or your own website/blog, reported cases. Maintaining and keeping track of the content that speaks about you would not only build trust in the clients’ eyes but also take your online reputation several notches up.

Content is the king, and context is the queen. If one can crack the content bit by understanding what could work out for the audience, what you wish to write for and how – you are good to go. Content planning plays a significant role in developing your practice.

While textual content is one form to leverage, video-type content is also picking up where the video adds a visual appeal to the content, thereby elevating your practice, quicker than what plain textual content would do. As a Senior Advocate, you can utilize the effectiveness of video-based content to become a thought leader. Content can also be disseminated by writing blogs, doing podcasts, and becoming pro-active on social media. Doing this would give the Senior Advocate an edge in nurturing many relationships with existing and prospective clients, as well as developing their practice.

Media support in today’s competition can spruce up your credibility and help you in establishing yourself as a thought leader, in your preferred practice area. As a Senior Advocate, the onus is on you to entrench thought-provoking discussions, provide your quotes in industry-related news, and contribute to opinion articles. Indulging in each of these exercises shall reap you the much-needed visibility, and the solid presence for you. Development Tips for Senior Advocates

Speaking in public is an empowering and rewarding exercise for Senior Advocates, as they can influence through their oratory skills. Participating in panel discussions, and attending conferences and events as a speaker is an excellent means to boost your offline profile, and personality development and very simply brings you forward as a thought leader.

International legal directories exist to provide individuals and organizations with a reliable and comprehensive resource for identifying and selecting legal service providers from around the world. Listing your practice on these directories can help you get noticed, not just in India but also globally. This is a great exercise to increase the visibility of your practice.

By being included in a reputable ranking by completing your submissions, you can gain more visibility, credibility, and recognition in the legal industry.

Indulging in developing your practice is important. However, as a Senior Advocate, it gets difficult to juggle and manage its nuances alongside their law practice. To combat the challenge, invest in a PR (Public Relations) agency that can capture your needs and help you with developing your practice.