A spectacularly discrete escape, an ostensibly public stealth drone, a burning island, a never-ending strike... 2020 is definitely shaping up to be a crazy year.
The most tenacious certainties evaporate as the temperature rises. Lie and truth are reversed and overturned at the speed of light. Everything is known but nothing is certain. Technological progress is accelerating as fast as our vision of the future is shrinking. By 2035, we could be on Mars as well as in Mad Max. Balanced between technological happiness and ecological apocalypse, traversed by the most revolutionary and reactionary winds, the era is one of paradoxes and paradigm shifts. So what are the communications trends to follow in 2020? The answer is not self-evident. If traditional reference points are becoming blurred, we might as well experiment and chart our own course. In other words, the year 2020 will be the year of the "madmen": those who have the audacity to try the incredible.
Let's refocus here. For a long time, the communication of the legal and financial professions has been conditioned by a respect for conventions intrinsically linked to their professional cultures: sobriety, restraint and pragmatism.
Today, the legal market is shaken by these same upheavals mentioned above. The conventions are fading away as new issues emerge for law firms and notary offices.
Employer branding, CSR, influence, commitment... all these new notions are laboratories for communicating differently and more freely than in purely commercial communication.However, these new challenges imply taking original and unusual initiatives in a legal market that has long remained static. By combining branding, press and public relations, and digital communications, it is possible to imagine new and truly innovative brand strategies. On the condition that you seize this wind of madness and dare to break with certain codes.
New media: the legal professions are fabulous content producers. By engaging in a real strategy of influence, combining the creation of media, the mobilization of internal know-how and the integration of external relays (such as influential personalities), legal actors have the opportunity to change the public's perception of their role and their commitment in a changing world.
Press relations: in this age of earned media (earned notoriety, as opposed to paid notoriety), PR takes on an unprecedented strategic importance. It is no longer a matter of simply placing experts or communicating about deals. The future lies in press relations integrating all communications channels (without value judgements) and varying the formats of the interventions and the targeted themes. In addition to embodying expertise, in the future we will have to embody a brand, with its know-how, but also its values, methods and positions...
CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility): CSR policies open up truly interesting communication opportunities for legal actors. But there may have been some misunderstanding about the meaning of CSR. A CSR policy in the legal sector will have more impact if it concerns the law, just as an ecological CSR policy has an echo if it concerns a previously polluting company. Unfortunately, legal infringements and lack of access to the law are sufficiently widespread for legal actors to fully grasp their societal and civic role.
Branding: goodbye to the "classic" creative guidelines and high-end pseudo-images that flourished in the 1990s. While they are moving away from their traditional sobriety, legal actors now have the opportunity to create a brand image in line with the latest graphic and UX/UI trends.
In conclusion, whatever initiative you take, dare to do something different this year! And if you're afraid of sounding crazy, remember this sentence from Alice in Wonderland: "If the world has absolutely no meaning, who is stopping us from inventing one? »
