Professional Services
Leydig, Voit & Mayer
The expertise was there. The business development story wasn’t
Leydig, Voit & Mayer is a premier boutique law firm that focuses exclusively on intellectual property. Its attorneys had litigated pharmaceutical patent cases since the Hatch-Waxman Act changed the industry in the 1980s, but the firm had only recently formalized that experience as a pharmaceutical litigation practice group.
The group needed a pitch deck it could send to existing clients and cold prospects without an attorney there to present it. That meant the deck had to answer prospective clients’ questions, demonstrate the group’s experience and give them a sense of the attorneys behind it.
The attorneys tried building it themselves first.
Challenges
1.
Leydig hadn’t turned decades of experience into proof.
The attorneys had extensive case experience, but they hadn’t captured much of it in a way they could use for business development. The existing deck didn’t quantify the group’s experience or tell stories that showed prospective clients how its attorneys worked.
2.
The attorneys were too close to their own story.
The in-house draft relied heavily on dense paragraphs, credentials and awards. The attorneys knew their practice inside and out, but they needed an outside perspective to identify what prospective clients would want to know and how to turn that information into a persuasive business development story.
Solution
We started with an audit.
Working from the group’s existing deck, we reviewed it slide by slide and identified what was missing. Then, we gave the attorneys a specific list of information to gather, including practice statistics, personal anecdotes for attorney bios and client work that could become mini case studies.
With those inputs in hand, we rebuilt the story. We reorganized the deck to move from firm-level positioning to individual attorney experience and wrote new content using client interviews and background materials.
The new deck included statistics that quantified the group’s experience, first-person quotes from practice leaders, personal anecdotes that turned traditional bios into stories and three mini case studies organized by situation, challenge and result.
We also developed a direct, distinctive voice for the practice group. The co-chair wanted the deck to reflect the group’s personality and appeal to clients who valued its approach, so we replaced traditional legal language with clear, conversational messaging.
Finally, we created a visual system that made the content easy to scan. Stat blocks highlighted the group’s scale, consistent bio layouts paired attorney headshots with pull quotes, and dedicated slides presented each mini case study clearly.
Results
1.
1 pitch deck supplied content for other channels.
The attorney bios worked so well that the group used them to update profiles on Leydig's website and LinkedIn, extending the work beyond the original business development asset.
2.
Prospects can see the group’s scale in seconds.
The new deck highlights more than 270 years of cumulative experience, more than 140 generic drug patent cases and more than 25 global pharmaceutical clients. None of those figures appeared in the attorneys’ original draft.
3.
The deck works without an attorney in the room.
Statistics establish the group’s depth of experience. Case studies demonstrate how its attorneys approach client matters. Quotes and personal stories introduce the people prospective clients would work with.
"It's all about the value added. … It's generating the ideas and generating the concept. And getting feedback on our own ideas."
