There’s no denying that the last year, in terms of work, have been chaotic. More than one day (especially when daycare was closed) I felt like I was running on vapors.

Survive and advance.

To the next day. Then do it all over again.

Out of the gate, my goal was to at least tread water. Our new work-at-home-with-the-toddlers-in-tow situation was uncharted territory. And temporary, right? I mean, this will be over with in a few weeks?

One year later, I’m typing this at my work station nestled in a corner of my kids’ play loft. A child’s kitchen and scattered car tracks often grace the backdrop of my video calls.

As far as work goes? I felt like our team did more than just tread water. We had some significant projects go through changing the way we worked…on top of actually having to change the way we worked.

What did our team at Womble accomplish this year?

Insights Portal Overhaul on Womble Bond Dickinson’s Site

Back late February/early March, we had plans to do a significant re-platforming of our website and implement a broader change. Once COVID hit and budget adjustments were made, we narrowed our resources to one part of our website: attorney thought leadership.

The insights of our website were a way that our attorneys credentialized themselves in the marketplace. We wanted to completely rebuild the experience and design it with the user in mind, not ourselves. With the help of the fantastic team at Launch, we were able to do just that.

Here’s the insights landing page before:

We included filters based on topic area, attorney name and date range. In addition to that, we migrated roughly a dozen external blogs that various attorneys had started in their focus practice areas and brought them into the insights portal along with our other content. This was done to help us prevent ourselves from cannibalizing ourselves online and keep as much attention on the firm website as possible.

Oh, and we overhauled the attorney bios as well, putting a much stronger visual emphasis on their thought leadership pieces. Nearly 40% of traffic for law firm websites goes to bios - so we wanted to make sure we made a great first impression.

The portal also baked in lead capturing where we could as well. Instead of taking a traditional gated landing page approach, we built forms into the content itself to keep users on the page and have a much more seamless experience. Our team had just wrapped up re-platforming our marketing automation tech (more on that later) the month this project kicked off. I was thrilled we were able to layer in a practical use of Pardot into another project as quickly as we were.

Re-platforming From Vuture to Pardot

In the legal marketing tech space, there is a fairly narrow lane of vendors that supply a healthy majority of all law firms. Vuture was one of those email marketing platforms that is heavily saturated in the legal industry.

When I came in, I didn’t want our digital efforts to reflect legal marketing best practices…I just wanted us to be the best digital marketing team we could be. Period. I also have a bit of a contrarian streak.

In that vein, we migrated our marketing automation platform from Vuture to Pardot. This was more than a lift and shift. This move disrupted a lot of processes with the BD side of our team and we had to look at both the operations side of what we did in marketing as well as the technology aspect. This project was no easy task and required help from every corner of our client development department (BD to digital to design) to get this across the finish line. A significant team effort.

Legal Marketing Association Award Wins

In addition to the two projects above, we also did a lot of work in two areas: a multi-disciplinary effort around the legal implications of COVID. We also had launched an employee social advocacy program using EveryoneSocial.

Both of those efforts were recognized by our peers and helped our team win a couple of awards from the LMA Southeast Chapter! I was especially proud of these since the meat of this was done in the first six weeks of COVID - the most chaotic part for all of us. You can read more about those awards on our redesigned insights portal here.

You Have To Reflect Or You’ll Lose Your Mind

It’s incredibly easy to get bogged down by to-do lists. To focus on what we haven’t gotten done. Maybe goals we didn’t achieve. Things that maybe didn’t go the way we wanted.

There was a lot of that for all of us this year.

It’s important to take a step back from time to time and see what you have gotten done. Count the things that went well. Reflect on some of the happy surprises that may have come along the way.

A “got done” list can sometimes drive productivity as much as a to-do list.

Either way, I’m thrilled with all the work our team at Womble was able to achieve this past year. In a year where just surviving is just a win, the team thrived. Here’s to the next year (and our long to-do list on it)!