Back in March 2013 I observed that Jonathan Shapiro, an attorney at WilmerHale (and now at BakerBotts) had spiced up his lawyer marketing in an interesting way. Using a legal article he had recently written in the San Francisco Daily Journal about SEC enforcement in the private equity area (“SEC likely to ramp-up private equity scrutiny"), Shapiro turned the article's key points into a very well-produced video interview with music, drums, animation, and so on.

I found the video concept interesting and predicted that more lawyers would begin to produce this new media form of "thought leadership." More than three years later, however, that does not seem to have happened in any meaningful way -- at least not in the securities enforcement practice area that I follow.

Recently, however, I have seen a series of videos from the law firm Fenwick & West covering different securities enforcement topics. The videos are short (two or three minutes) and pretty basic, and simply feature an attorney on camera discussing the same type of hot topics that law firms have been discussing in client memos for decades. In the four securities enforcement-related videos that Fenwick has posted since July 2016, Fenwick partner Michael Dicke addresses hot topics such as the SEC's use of "Big Data" to root out accounting fraud, corporations' response to whistleblowers, and the SEC's increased scrutiny of secondary market trading in the private equity area and of Silicon Valley. 

You can check out Fenwick's most recent securities enforcement video ("Big Data is the SEC's New Secret Sauce in Search for Potential Accounting Fraud") at this link. It won't win any awards for Best Cinematography but in today's legal marketing world that is still completely dominated by written client memos, it is an interesting change of pace to see lawyers present information and themselves in a different way.

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