How's Conrad doing? He's glad you asked - SANDRA RUBIN

Before the jury even started deliberating in the Conrad Black trial there was already one clear winner: the law firm of Perkins Coie. In a masterful demonstration of the power of marketing smarts, the Seattle-based firm used the media baron's 15-week trial as a springboard to brand its young Chicago office.

It's a lesson that Canadian firms looking to build in a new market, or differentiate themselves in an old one, might want to heed.

With news organizations from around the world descending on Chicago, Hugh Totten, a litigator at Perkins Coie, sat down with Lori Anger from the marketing department to figure out how to capitalize on the situation.

Mr. Totten is the partner in charge of lateral recruitment at the five-year-old Chicago office, and he knew the office needed more profile to attract the kind of lawyers - and clients - it wants.

Perkins Coie is a blue-chip West Coast firm that acts for Boeing, Microsoft, Starbucks and Amazon. It opened in Chicago after Boeing relocated there. But Perkins Coie is not a brand name in the east, and cracking the tight Chicago legal market has proven a bit of a slog.

It's a dynamic all too familiar to Canadian firms such as Osler Hoskin & Harcourt in Calgary, Blake Cassels & Graydon in Montreal, and Macleod Dixon, Ogilvy Renault or Bennett Jones in Toronto.

So Mr. Totten and Ms. Anger developed a strategy to get the Perkins Coie name out there. Mr. Totten would go to the courthouse for a couple of hours every day to monitor the trial and offer himself up to reporters looking for comment on the latest developments.

"I do mostly commercial litigation and this trial struck me as pretty close to the kind of stuff that I do - lots of documents, and complex transactions that have to be explained to the jury," Mr. Totten says. "I work literally right next to the courthouse so I was able to go over on a daily basis and see what was going on. I never really anticipated the response that I got. It's been amazing."

To be fair, Mr. Totten had a couple of advantages. For starters, he is a former city editor of Purdue's The Exponent, his college newspaper, so he's comfortable winging it with reporters. And he realized most of Chicago's entrenched corporate law firms wouldn't be able to speak to the media about Lord Black's trial because they were acting for one of the parties.

So he took the plunge and set aside about 100 billable hours to monitor the trial and talk with reporters during breaks or at the end of the day. He says he doesn't know of any other large corporate law firm that has done anything similar. But he and Ms. Anger thought it was worth a try.

Good hunch. There were about 400 accredited reporters from around the world and a surprising number, hungry for interpretation of the day's events, regularly turned to Mr. Totten for his read. He figures he gave well over 100 interviews and was quoted by news outlets ranging from the Financial Times of London and The New York Times to the Chicago Tribune, The Scotsman, Reuters, Bloomberg, CBC, CTV and even the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

And each time he was quoted, Perkins Coie's name - and the fact it has a Chicago office - were right up there with him.

While some senior partners might be loath to take themselves off the billing track for such a whack of time (100 hours could represent $80,000 of docketed time), Mr. Totten is convinced it more than paid off.

"I doubt that 100 billable hours comes anywhere close to the value of the publicity we have received," he says. "My own personal viewpoint is it's been very successful for us. We'll have to wait and see how my partners review me at the end of the year."

He shouldn't have any trouble producing testimonials for the compensation committee. He says there has been an enormous amount of feedback. "I've received many, many e-mails from people in Chicago saying, 'Wow, you're just getting great publicity here. Keep it up. Wish we could do it ourselves.' I know my partners here are very happy with what's going on."

They should be. Mr. Totten's marketing experiment was so successful, the National Law Journal wrote a story about it. It's one that should resonate in Canada.

Faced with a shrinking corporate client base, top-tier Canadian firms realize they have to steal business from competitors to grow market share. One way to do that is to differentiate themselves, positioning the firm as dominant in one or two key areas. The other is to break into new geographic markets and try to pick off existing business.

Marketing is key either way, says Lise Monette, the chief marketing officer at Ogilvy Renault.

"Your clients need to know you're there, so a visibility campaign is important - particularly for a firm like ours, which is somewhat of a new entrant on the [Toronto] market," she says. "You won't be considered on a [request for proposal] if they don't know you're there, so marketing plays a huge role. You're always looking for ways to be innovative, but it's a cluttered market and it's not always that easy to do."

Richard Stock, a Vancouver-based partner with legal consultants Catalyst Consulting, says Canadian firms are so busy right now that many senior partners don't see the need for marketing and branding. But he predicts they will, once the bull market comes to an end, and he applauds Mr. Totten's initiative.

"Any time you can raise the visibility in a crowded field it is a great idea - especially if you work in an office away from the mother ship," Mr. Stock says. "This kind of accelerator is terrific. Frankly, I don't see a lot of such initiatives."