How do you build and maintain the position of an expert in a specific, specialized, hermetic, and competitive market of legal services? How do you reach the media, institutional clients, and individuals despite the difficult times? Get to know the case study – the results of our cooperation with the OKW Law Office, showing the effectiveness of image communication regardless of the situation.
About the Client
The OKW Law Office provides comprehensive and professional legal assistance in Polish, English, and Dutch, practicing the Western style of providing legal services. The law firm has been operating on the Polish market for almost twenty years and has offices in Warsaw and Wrocław.
The law office offers broadly understood legal advice, including participation in negotiations, training, drafting, and reviewing contracts, conducting court disputes, but also creating favorable business opportunities thanks to an extensive network of contacts and knowledge of foreign markets. OKW operates in very different areas: from legal advice for big businesses to settlements of disputes within an organization and labor law, insurance law, and family law. The OKW Law Office specializes in international legal relations and cross-border disputes.
OKW’s partners, Marta Olczak-Klimek, Remco van der Kroft, Maciej Węgiełek, Karolina Lach-Guziak, and Jan Szary uniquely combine in-depth knowledge of Polish law with the Dutch approach to customer service which characterized by direct contact.
Objectives and Challenges of the Project
The main goal of our communication activities was to strengthen and maintain the client’s position in the legal services market by creating the image of selected experts. The experts indicated by the client were: Marta Olczak-Klimek, attorney-at-law specializing in business law and insurance law, Maciej Węgiełek, attorney-at-law specializing in real estate and construction law, and Elżbieta Kosińska van den Berg, attorney-at-law, a specialist in the field of, inter alia, family and inheritance law.
Project Implementation and Challenges
Our cooperation with OKW Law Office was based on building relations with the media whose recipients are the target group, i.e., potential clients and the industry environment. In addition, our activities included elements of personal branding, i.e., building the image of personal brands of the indicated lawyers, as a supplement to the expert image of the law firm. Since in this case we were dealing with extremely specialized legal knowledge and topics, we focused on high-quality publications in the form of articles of opinion and expert materials. To make the topics more accessible to the recipient and interesting for the media, we have always tried to embed the issues of Polish law in current events.
Our task was to reach the largest possible group of people potentially interested in legal services. During the project implementation, the main challenge was the differences between the target groups of individual experts and their high degree of specialization. Accordingly, we have built a relationship with journalists who are potentially interested in topics from each of the experts separately because the clients of the law firm are recipients of various media, big businesses, insurance companies, and natural persons looking for legal services in divorce or property proceedings.
Thanks to our support, it was possible to establish lasting relations with the titles of interest to the client.
The COVID pandemic was still ongoing during the cooperation, so contacts with journalists were relatively difficult. From the beginning of 2022, the tragic news from Ukraine was the main topic that dominated the media. Naturally, the editorial office’s interest in topics other than those related to the war decreased. During this difficult period, we adjusted the experts’ communication to the media’s needs.
Throughout the period of cooperation, we maintain positive relations with editorial offices, thanks to which the recognition of experts has been gradually increasing. In the interests of the client’s image, we also undertook additional complementary activities in relation to the media relations service provided (e.g., we provided comments on the website, advised CSR activities, and refreshed the profiles on the Linkedin portal).
After the publication of the most important publications, we additionally posted information on this topic on the social media profile of the law firm and individual employees to increase the likelihood of reaching people interested in the subject. As the law firm serves foreign clients, the information was published in Polish and English.
The Effects of Our Actions
The cooperation resulted in numerous publications and printing exposés of all experts from the law firm. They appeared in such titles as: My Company Polska, INFOR, Forbes, and Forbes Woman. Communication was adjusted to the target group of each expert.
Attorney at Law Olczak-Klimek, as a specialist in the field of insurance law, became, inter alia, a permanent journalist of the trade “Gazeta Ubezpieczeniowa”.
publikacja Gazeta Ubezpieczeniowa
Advocate Kosińska van den Berg specialized in, among others, in family law. She had the opportunity to be a guest on the broadcast and podcast of radio Eska Rock, reaching individual entities.
We are glad that the information about the activities of the OKW Law Office has spread so widely, and the knowledge of experts under our image supervision still reaches the interested people. Customer satisfaction is always our priority. Thanks to our commitment and the results achieved, the law firm decided to continue cooperation.