25 Years Edge Marketing - an interview with Founder & CEO Amy Juers

05
Jul
2022

Lisa Chontos

Edge Marketing, Inc. - formerly known as Edge Legal Marketing and Accounting Edge Marketing - is celebrating its 25^th anniversary of serving the needs of legal and accounting professionals on a global basis. The agency has elevated hundreds of clients by delivering impactful, exciting results through its public relations, strategy development and implementation, branding and fractional CMO services.

Legal IT Professionals has worked closely with Edge Marketing for many years and asked Lisa Chontos to interview Edge Founder and CEO Amy Juers.

Can you tell me about your personal background and what drew you to the legal industry and marketing/PR specifically?

Back when I was going for my master’s degree, I was hunting for a job in the newspaper. I saw that Quorum, a litigation services company, needed someone with a master’s degree – I got the job and worked in both data analytics and marketing.  My role evolved into a full-time marketing position.  Ultimately, I became Director of Marketing and spent 5 years as Director of Marketing at Quorum. 

During my tenure there, Quorum wanted to focus on PR as well, so they hired LegalVoice, the agency which eventually became Edge Marketing.  Later, after Quorum was acquired by Kroll, I moved over to LegalVoice.  In 2006, I acquired the firm and changed its name to Edge and we rolled out the new brand in January 2007.

Could you please provide some highlights of Edge Marketing's 25-year history and what's new with the company?

Edge is honored to be highly regarded by our peers.  Our firm has won numerous industry awards over the years.  In 2021, we won the New York Law Journal Best of 2021, Texas Lawyer Best of 2021, The Recorder (California) Best of 2021, and the 2021 MarCom Awards for strategic communications and print media.  In the last decade alone, the Edge team has facilitated over 100 strategic marketing and public relations campaigns, including company launches and rebrands, product and service launches, and mergers and acquisitions, including 48 product and service launches, 35 mergers and/or acquisitions, 15 company launches, and 7 company rebrands.

One of our biggest accomplishments as an agency was launching The Edge Room™, a virtual press room for Legalweek conferences.  For this year’s Legalweek conference, exhibitors and sponsors have uploaded over 4,000 documents to the electronic portal.  The media can access Edge Room and find material from different companies, thought leaders and client insight pieces to see who’s talking about AI, e-discovery, or data security and privacy, for example.

When I first came to the agency, I had advertising skills and I strengthened my PR expertise over time.  Edge is a firm of generalists but I have added people when we needed specialists.  For example, as social media became a major influence, I added a digital marketing expert to my team.

How has Edge shifted its focus recently to address recent legal tech trends/occurrences such as market consolidation and M&A, Covid pandemic, etc.?

Mostly what we see is that virtual events haven’t brought  the same ROI as in-person events.  Because of this, for the last couple of years, we have started leveraging more educational content and paid digital campaigns for our clients.  Content is always king.  We have gone deeper and farther into the PR channel.  We predict that market consolidation is not going to stop.  Because of this, we have a very solid process and strategy to help clients merge their brands while still retaining the loyal following and brand recognition that made them successful.  

What trends are you watching unfold in legal IT right now and how are they impacting your firm and your clients?

The biggest trend we’ve seen recently is the remote workforce and its impact on business.  Data privacy and security are influential factors in terms of what companies can do or not. Technology has had to adapt to a remote workforce.  

During this pandemic, I have had immediate flashbacks to the 2008 recession which was a difficult time for most companies.  I’m proud of the fact that Edge has remained stable the whole time, through both the recession and the pandemic.  Some of our clients’ businesses were impacted by these historical events, but they stayed with us and are still our clients today. 

From a marketing perspective, what are the greatest challenges that your clients typically face?  

The lack of in-person events has forced companies to change how they present themselves, their products, and their services in the marketplace.  There was initial concern about budget and spend for marketing.  But we’ve seen the numbers come through and marketing budgets are still climbing, and we see that we should just keep going forward, marching on.  

How does your firm assist them in overcoming those obstacles?

We have had to take a step back and adjust to incorporate more effective strategies that worked for our clients.  Now, as the world opens up and people come back into offices, we know we’ll have to do that again.  Over the last three years we’ve been able to retain most of our clients and help them succeed despite the fact that the world is constantly changing.

Can you share some insights or anecdotes from the recent ABA TECHSHOW and/or Legalweek conferences?

The 2022 ABA TECHSHOW started off well.  Everybody was so happy to be back together in person, unmasked, as the mask mandate was lifted the day before the event.  People were so happy to see each other.  While there may not have been as many conversations, it was good quality over big quantity.  TECHSHOW had lighter attendance and fewer exhibitors than Legalweek, but Legalweek also had fewer exhibitors than years past.  Specifically, Legalweek 2022 featured 146 exhibitors and sponsors, whereas Legalweek 2020 had featured 172.  This decrease is completely explainable though – many people are still concerned about Covid and are not traveling or given budgets in-person events.

Can you share an example of where Edge went above and beyond in helping a law firm client accomplish an ambitious goal?

This is a tough question because, over the course of 25 years, we’ve achieved many ambitious goals for clients.  I recall being introduced to a new client at Legalweek 2020.  The company had a name and website URL but nothing else. Edge designed its logo, built their new website and created all of their branding and marketing communications content and materials.  We then launched the company in the legal industry by early summer 2020.  Since the company launch, Edge has served as the company’s fractional CMO for two years.  In that two-year span, we have shepherded them through three acquisition announcements, and launched the ACC Data Steward Program (a cybersecurity certification program run by the ACC) where they serve as the only ACC-Accredited Assessor company.  Our agency has also helped propel this client to be a thought leader in the industry.  Their executive is now writing a book on insurance cybersecurity and is keynoting one of the top legal security and technology conferences in the world.  Building presence and driving sales for our clients have always been at the heart of what we do at Edge.  What a memorable journey I have had with a truly amazing team.